A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
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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. |
In the pilot, two Sync/PDI customers, Euro-Pro and HWI USA provided images. These images were hosted within Sync/PDI and Lowe's and Target presented their Digital Certificates to gain access to the images.
The pilot group has completed the testing phase of the pilot and is now working on their recommendations. A key aspect of these recommendations will be how all the different standards combine to form a streamlined solution for vendors to provide images and other digital files to their retailers. We expect to see further information this fall.