The Product Data Problem Nobody Wants to Admit

Every retailer, manufacturer, and distributor has a version of this story.

The ERP has one set of product records. The ecommerce platform has another. The supplier portal has a third. Marketing has a spreadsheet that nobody has updated since 2022. And somewhere in a shared drive there's a "master" catalog that three people maintain manually, and nobody agrees on which version is current.

The result: wrong product descriptions on your website. Pricing inconsistencies across channels. Duplicate SKUs in your warehouse system. Failed product launches because the data wasn't ready. Regulatory submissions delayed because nobody could produce a clean product record on demand.

This isn't a technology problem. Every company already has technology. It's a data architecture problem — product information scattered across systems with no single governed source of truth.

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LakeFusion PIM on Databricks Lakebase solves it at the source.

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Product Information Management — Built for the Lakehouse

LakeFusion PIM is a Databricks-native product information management platform implemented by Frisco Analytics. It is designed for business users managing complex product catalogs across multiple upstream and downstream channels — without relying on IT to make changes.

Unlike legacy PIM systems that sit outside your data infrastructure and require expensive integration work to stay in sync, LakeFusion PIM runs natively on Databricks. Lakebase serves as the source of truth. Every product record, every taxonomy, every hierarchy — governed by Unity Catalog, queryable in SQL, accessible to any downstream system in real time.

Zero data egress. Available as a Databricks Marketplace App.

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What Customers Are Building

Manufacturing — Clean Part Numbers Across the Enterprise

A mid-size manufacturer producing across dozens of product lines had part numbers that varied between engineering, procurement, production, and finance. The same physical component had four different identifiers depending on which system you asked. Procurement was ordering duplicates. Finance couldn't reconcile inventory.

LakeFusion PIM brought all product hierarchies into a single Lakebase-served catalog — 1-tier down to 4-tier, aligned to a taxonomy the business defined and can update without IT. Engineering, procurement, and production now query the same record. The catalog is the system of record, not a downstream export.

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Retail and Ecommerce — Product Data That's Ready When You Are

For retailers and ecommerce operators, product launch speed is a competitive advantage. Every day a product sits in a data backlog is a day of lost revenue.

LakeFusion PIM gives merchandising and content teams the ability to dynamically edit product attributes in real time and live-edit the data model as the catalog evolves. New product categories, new attributes, new channel requirements — business users handle it directly through the user dashboard, without waiting for a data engineering sprint. Taxonomy with unlimited depth means the catalog grows as the business grows.

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Distribution — Syndication That Actually Works

Distributors operate at the intersection of hundreds of suppliers and thousands of downstream customers. Clean, consistent product data is the thing that makes everything else possible — accurate order fulfillment, correct invoicing, reliable catalog feeds to retail partners.

LakeFusion PIM simplifies data syndication across the enterprise. The Lakebase-served product catalog becomes the single source that all downstream systems consume — trading partner feeds, marketplace listings, ERP integrations, analytics pipelines. One update propagates everywhere. Row-level access control ensures each downstream system sees exactly the data it's entitled to.

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CPG and Food & Beverage — Regulatory and Retailer Compliance

Consumer packaged goods companies face product data requirements from multiple directions simultaneously — retailer portals, regulatory agencies, labeling compliance systems, sustainability reporting frameworks. Each has its own format, its own required attributes, its own update cadence.

LakeFusion PIM manages product attributes, nutritional data, and compliance fields as governed records in Lakebase — with the audit trail Unity Catalog provides built in. When a retailer asks for a product data file or a regulator asks for a compliance record, the answer is a query, not a project.

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The Architecture Under the Hood

Delta Lake — Ingestion Layer All incoming product data — from CRM, ERP, flat files, and operational systems — lands in Delta Lake. Staging, match results, and survivorship history are CDF-enabled for change data capture, keeping the catalog current as source systems evolve.

Lakebase — Source of Truth LakeFusion PIM runs four core capabilities directly on Lakebase: taxonomy management, hierarchy inheritance, live data editing, and row-level access control. Three-layer caching (shared_buffers · golden_record · xref_cache) delivers sub-5ms golden record lookups. Business users interact through a user dashboard, product catalog views, taxonomies, user-defined workflows, and imports and exports — all served from Lakebase in real time.

LLM Match Agents on Serverless SQL Warehouse Entity resolution, probabilistic matching, attribute standardization, and reference mapping run as LLM-powered agents on Databricks Serverless. Duplicate products from different source systems get resolved automatically. New supplier data is normalized to your taxonomy without manual mapping.

4-Strategy Survivorship When the same product exists in multiple source systems, LakeFusion PIM resolves conflicts using four configurable survivorship strategies — most recent, most trusted source, highest frequency, and longest-standing record. The golden product record reflects your business rules, not the last system to write.

Unity Catalog — Governance End to End Access controls, data lineage, audit logs, and stewardship workflows are Unity Catalog-native across Delta Lake and Lakebase. Row-level security means different teams and downstream systems see only the product data they're entitled to. Every change is logged. Every record is traceable.

Zero data egress. The entire PIM lifecycle — ingest, match, master, serve, syndicate — runs inside Databricks. Available as a Databricks Marketplace App.

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Getting Started

Every engagement starts with a half-day discovery workshop. We map your current product data landscape — source systems, downstream consumers, taxonomy complexity, channel requirements — and scope a path to a governed, Lakebase-served product catalog on Databricks.

Most teams are surprised how quickly a clean product catalog changes what the business can do.

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Frisco Analytics is a certified LakeFusion SI partner and Databricks Brickbuilder partner, implementing LakeFusion PIM on the Databricks Lakehouse.

Contact: contact@friscoanalytics.com