Data synchronisation benefits not felt

The food industry has not reaped the benefits of global data synchronisation (GDS), because of lack of sponsorship from operational and commercial managers, it has been claimed.

Evangelists for GDS say it will eliminate the errors, invoice disputes and stock shortages caused by bad data and enable the seamless international exchange of standardised product information between trading partners.

The theory is that suppliers participating in the global data synchronisation network (GDSN) should only have to publish information about new or updated products once, in one of a series of data pools (giant electronic product catalogues). Retailers could then access this data and automatically update their own systems at the click of a button.

However, this was still some way off, said David Hogg, marketing manager at data quality and synchronisation software supplier Sterling Commerce, which has been helping firms such as Cadbury manage their data.

Hogg said: “The single biggest reason that GDS is not progressing is that the people sitting on the GDS adoption committee are all IT middle managers. The people who need to drive this are buyers, merchandisers and commercial people, that is, the people who understand what a 10% reduction in out of stocks can deliver to the bottom line.”

Some food manufacturers had started to upload product data to the new GS1 UK data pool to trade with Asda and Makro, he said. However, the system did not, as yet, facilitate machine-to-machine (automatic) communication with retailers.

In the US, many companies participating in GDS were still doing it manually, which defeated the purpose, he added. “Cleaning up your own data and presenting it in a standardised way is all very well, but if you are manually re-keying data into IT systems to exchange with your trading partners, you are going to make mistakes. The industry is paying lip service to GDS. It’s not the real thing. It’s low-cost printing and re-keying and it’s not going to deliver the benefits.”

Ultimately, participating in the GDSN is expected to become a condition of doing business with major retailers, predicted GS1 UK, the supply chain standards body.