Aligndata Volume 1-2

Data Sync helps the Visually Impaired Consumer

Consider for a moment you are a visually impaired consumer. Many of the consumer products typically found in home cupboards have similar shapes - "is it a can of hairspray or aerosol paint?" Clearly selecting the right can is both a safety and quality of life issue. En-Vision America provides a "talking barcode scanner" that addresses this need. The i.d. mate OMNI talking barcode scanner allows visually impaired consumers to identify products in their home.

For the past ten years En-Vision America has been manually collecting data on over 2 million GTIN's. Recently they implemented data sync to automate the maintenance of this database.

Knowing the effort involved in collecting and maintaining these two million UPC's, En-Vision American was interested in how Data Synchronization could help them streamline and improve the completeness and quality of information that they provide in the device.

Lowe's Focus on New Item Introductions

It is a cliche to say that data synchronization changes the business process but Lowe's vendors are certainly finding this true. As Lowe's has gone "live" with vendors, GDSN is now the driver for new product listings. This has been a big change as vendors discover that their GDSN process isn't keeping up with the business process.

Lowe's has over the past several months instituted a campaign to ensure that vendors publish new products within 7 days of Lowe's issuing the Subscription. More recently, Lowe's has started various reporting on "open subscriptions" that they provide to Solution Partners such as Aligntrac. To further focus vendors on this need, Lowe's has created Vendor Scorecards and Solution Partner Scorecards which are available on the Loweslink.com website. Aligntrac has been reviewing all of these reports with our customers that deal with Lowe's. The Aligntrac Scorecard is pretty good but we want it to be even better.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

As the old saying goes "a picture says a thousand words", so it is no surprise that images of products have become increasingly important to retailers. The growth in images has caused retailers and vendors to look for more efficient means to disseminate images throughout the Supply Chain. Over the past few months, GS1 US has been conducting a pilot project dealing with vendors providing images to retailers. Aligntrac Solutions with two of our customers (vendors) have been participating in the pilot with Lowe's and Target as the retailers.

The pilot combined several different technologies to allow retailers to easily retrieve images from all their vendors. The goal of the pilot was to enable retailers to retrieve the images they desired without the retailer having to remember passwords to many vendor or image provider web sites. In the pilot , GS1 US provided the participants with Digital Certificates. These "digital keys" were used to provide the retailers with access to the images without the retailer having to remember multiple passwords. The images were identified according to the GS1 Image Standards. The envisioned solution will also use some new GDSN functionality which allows the vendor to transmit a list of image URL's and associated characteristics (size, purpose, etc.) to the retailers.

Keeping your Sales Team In-Sync

Ensuring new products aren't delayed hitting the shelves is important. As retailers gear up into production like Lowe's, many users are finding out that Sync/PDI has features to help them out. In particular Sync/PDI's search capability and reporting features can be used to create reports for your Sales Teams.

For most Sales Teams there is one main consideration getting new products listed with the retailer. Secondarily, they may be asked by their retailer to "sync" existing items. For either situation Sync/PDI provides you with the tools to complete the process.

Easy Synchronization