Sainsbury: suppliers must clean up their data
GDS enables trading partners to exchange standardised product information via huge electronic data pools in a bid to speed up communication and tackle the lost or late deliveries, inaccurate orders, surplus transport costs and duplicated work caused by discrepancies between data held by retailers/caterers and their suppliers.
In an exclusive interview with FoodManufacture.co.uk following a conference hosted by standards body GS1 UK, Sainsbury’s head of IT transformation Gary Balmer said the six-month trial involved 60 suppliers of varying sizes across several sectors.
Some of the manufacturers involved were already familiar with the GDSN as they were exchanging product data via the network with other customers such as Makro and Spar, he said.
“In some cases, we were the ones that had to do most of the work. For smaller suppliers, we’ve produced simple user guides to help explain what it is all about, as it can seem a bit scary when you first start to look at it.”
While momentum was building behind GDS and Sainsbury was looking to get more suppliers on board, it had no immediate plans to issue a mandate making participation in the GDSN a condition of doing business with Sainsbury, he stressed.
There were also no immediate plans to follow Wal-Mart’s lead by introducing a data accuracy scorecard for Sainsbury suppliers, he said. “I don’t actually think this is the way things will evolve. We need to stress the benefits to both parties of sharing accurate, standardised core data.”
Bad data causes big headaches
Discrepancies between data held by retailers and their suppliers were responsible for commercial and logistical headaches throughout the food supply chain, claimed Balmer. “You only have to look at the recent Data Crunch report [published in October 2009 by GS1 UK] to see what a big problem this is.
“In something like 80% of cases, the report uncovered inconsistencies in what should have been identical information in retailers’ and suppliers’ IT systems.”
Currently, retailers and suppliers were “very adept at doing manual workarounds” such as manual investigations to cross-check the accuracy of data. But this was enormously time-consuming.
Data was also being maintained in multiple locations, which increased the likelihood of inconsistencies and meant that the same information was being entered, manually, into several different systems, he added.
Online shopping platforms also meant that trading partners needed to store far more information about products than they used to, he argued. If this information were being manually entered into multiple systems by multiple people, errors were inevitable:“The level of duplicated effort is unsustainable in the long-term.”
If data in these different locations did not match, problems would follow, he said. “Let’s say a supplier is doing a promotion with extra-free packs, which are bigger than the standard ones. If we don’t have the dimensions of the larger packs in our systems, they won’t fit on the shelf, or on the truck, or they won’t be accepted at the depot.”
Click here to download the GS1 UK Data Crunch Report.
