Food manufacturers pledge to clean up product data

By Elaine Watson

- Last updated on GMT

Related tags Retailing Supermarket

Food manufacturers pledge to clean up product data
Six-out-of-10 food manufacturers are planning to pump more cash into improving the quality of product data exchanged with customers this year, according to Food Manufacture’s annual state of the nation survey.

58% of firms polled in our survey agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: ‘My company plans to invest more into improving the quality of product data shared with customers this year.’

Only 23% disagreed, while the remainder ticked ‘don’t know’.This compared to 44% in agreement when we last asked this question in 2008.

The results suggested that manufacturers were finally beginning to grasp that high-quality, standardised product data could deliver significant business benefits, said GS1 UK chief executive Gary Lynch.

“This survey clearly demonstrates the growing importance of data quality amongst food manufacturers and their customers. GS1 UK's Data Crunch report, published last year, revealed the high costs of bad product data in the retail grocery sector and a four-fold increase in the amount of data the sector would have to hold in its systems to cope with consumer and regulatory demands for more information.

“Both retailers and manufacturers should consider cleansing their data before adopting Global Data Synchronisation (GDS), which is already in use in other countries to address these product data inconsistencies and reduce costs.”

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 and their suppliers.

GDS: Maybe this year?

However, Lansa, which helps companies achieve GS1-compliant data synchronisation using its DataSync Direct software, said the results of the FM survey should be treated with caution.

European marketing manager Ian Piddock told FoodManufacture.co.uk that he was “encouraged​” by the apparent enthusiasm for cleaning up and synchronising product data, but believed a retailer mandate was required if GDS were to gain critical mass in the UK.

He added: “We’ve been saying ‘maybe this is the year for GDS’ for quite a few years now, but if it is going to happen, one of the big retailers needs to do now what Wal-Mart has done in the US [mandate suppliers to engage in GDS] if it is really going to take off. People say GDS is working in the States. But why is that? It’s because Wal-Mart issued a mandate and suppliers had to get on board.”

Why is bad data a problem?

Discrepancies between data held by retailers and their suppliers are responsible for commercial and logistical headaches throughout the food supply chain.

In an interview​ with FoodManufacture.co.uk last month about its recent GDS trial with 60 suppliers, Sainsbury’s head of IT transformation Gary Balmer 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.”

But he had no immediate plans to follow Wal-Mart’s lead by making GDS a condition of doing business with Sainsbury’s, 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.​”

The results of Food Manufacture’s​ annual survey will be published in full next month.

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