Easy Synchronization

Lowe’s ran two sessions on doing business with Lowe’s. The first session provided an overall introduction to Lowe’s and their various supply chain initiatives.  Lowe’s presented their overall product information strategy and how it drives their business. A key point was an analysis of how Lowe’s traditionally focused its advertising efforts vs. how consumers now make product purchase decisions – hence why product information – GDSN and marketing is important to Lowe’s. Lowe’s also spoke to their efforts to reduce the time required to setup new items and the importance of suppliers monitoring status messages on a daily basis until their items are synchronized.

The second day’s presentation was on data quality. Lowe’s described a pilot currently underway with six strategic suppliers. In the pilot, Lowe’s was comparing dimensions and weights in Lowe’s Item File against the vendor’s GDSN data and then physically measuring the product.  The initial results indicated that both vendor and Lowe’s data missed the GS1’s tolerances on a significant percentage of products. The pilot participants are working with Lowe’s and GS1 to identify root causes and share best practices.

Lowe’s also highlighted progress on their other data quality initiatives:

• Brand Name – vendors need to ensure that the Brand Name field matches entries that are defined in Lowe’s Master Brand List.
• Country of Origin – vendors need to ensure that this field is populated and is accurate.
• Model – vendors should remove any special characters from this field.
• Dimensions – Lowe’s described their findings around how a product’s dimensions may change as the product moves through its life-cycle from early product samples through to initial production and then new production versions. Lowe’s is working with manufacturers and GS1 on best practices and standards – these would include manufacturers having procedures in place to re-measure products as the product goes through these life cycle changes.

Wakefern provided an update on their GDSN initiative. Wakefern is leveraging GDSN to improve the quality and accuracy of their product information and highlighted the costs and delays of inaccurate product information. Wakefern then described their initiative to physically audit the GDSN information being provided by suppliers. Wakefern recommends that suppliers implement a systematic approach to GDSN and data quality that includes accountability for complete, accurate and timely product information.

McLane described their Product Introduction portal and how they use GDSN data to drive their new item introduction process and use the Product Introduction portal to “top off” the data with attributes such as price and distribution centers being supplied.

Dot Foods gave a presentation covering what they had learned from the Foodservice GDSN pilot and their subsequent roll-out of GDSN.  Key points include:

• Manufacturers were able to easily leverage GDSN for foodservice but need to work on providing the additional data attributes needed by Foodservice,
• Dot’s implementation process includes an audit of the manufacturer’s GDSN data. Dot is providing this comparison report to the manufacturer to review and identify whether corrections are required in the manufacturer’s GDNS data or in Dot’s Item File.
• Dot is live with many manufacturers and is ahead of their goals for the year.

Wegmans provided an overview of their progress on GDSN and highlighted the value of clean/accurate data and the costs/impacts of imperfection.

Wegmans described their scorecards from their audits of physical dimensions vs. manufacturers’ GDSN data and how they rank vendors on these scorecards.

Sears Holdings’ session covered their sustainability initiatives, an update on their EDI program and information on their GDSN initiative.

Sears is currently using GDSN for new items with full data synchronization coming in 2011. Sears has incorporated GDSN into their Item Maintenance Application (IMA). Suppliers access IMA via the web to complete proprietary information and submit items to Sears.

Best Buy’s presentation covered their EDI activities domestically and internationally and the status of their GDSN initiative.

On GDSN, Best Buy continues to extend the number of categories/departments active in GDSN. Best Buy has an extensive range of product attributes to be populated in GDSN and their PIM portal and continues to add even more attributes and attribute values as they extend their use of the system.

Wal-Mart provided a presentation on their efforts to move environmental reporting into the GDSN standards. Wal-Mart described their historical use of MSDS Sheets and current use of third parties to assess the chemical aspects of products in order to manage items in their stores and comply with local state and city regulations. Wal-Mart is part of an industry team working to develop standards for simplified chemical information that can then be included in GDSN as additional data attributes.