Easy Synchronization

So you have heard about the foodservice initiative, but what does it mean to your existing data sync activities? Well the good news is that your existing experience with data sync will leave you in good shape and very likely you will be able to discontinue some “one-off” solutions that you may have had to do for individual foodservice distributors.

From our work in the foodservice GDSN pilot, Aligntrac saw that there were three areas that all of the participating manufacturers had to focus on:

1. Loading foodservice-only GTINs. In many situations manufacturers had previously not registered their foodservice-only GTINs in GDS so they had to gather, verify and load information for these additional GTINs.
2. Loading additional attributes. While most of the foodservice Phase One data attributes were already populated, most manufacturers found that there were 4-5 additional data attributes required by their foodservice distributor partners (see list below).
3. Planning to address synchronizing data lower than case level. Manufacturers should plan on assigning GTINs to inner packs which are not marked with a barcode. This will enable the entire supply chain to use GTINs - even those parts of the supply chain that deal in “break packs” and today have to assign their own proprietary product identifiers to inner packs.

For Phase One, the foodservice manufacturers that participated in the foodservice GDSN pilot found that over and above what they were doing for retail trading partners there were only five additional fields that they potentially needed to consider. So for many companies the foodservice initiative will allow them to easily expand the use of data sync to their foodservice customers and at the same time discontinue proprietary solutions that they may have had to adopt for individual distributors.

Field	Purpose
Product Life from Production	Used for stock rotation
Storage Temperature	Used to determine handling – Dry, Frozen, Refrigerated
Class of Trade	Used in item setup – General, Foodservice, C-Store
Alternative Item Number	Used in transition from Mfr Item Nr to GTINs
Diet Type Code (Kosher)	Used to properly market product to customers