Foodservice Leveraging Manufacturer Data Sync
The foodservice initiative for data synchronization is good news for those who supply foodservice. With this initiative, manufacturers who have already implemented data synchronization for their retail partners will be able to leverage data sync for their foodservice trading partners. Previously, manufacturers may have been challenged by duplicate costs and effort to support multiple proprietary connections for each of their major foodservice distributors.
The foodservice working committee has created a voluntary roadmap which has two phases for data synchronization. The first phase focuses on logistics data attributes and is very similar to the data attributes needed for dealing with retailers such as Wal-Mart and SuperValu. In fact, most manufacturers will need to only add four or five additional attributes to what they have already provided to retailers (see the Getting Ready for Foodservice article in this newsletter). The second phase is currently being defined by the foodservice working group and focuses on the marketing and nutritional data attributes.
For many foodservice manufacturers the initiative will seem relatively easy and yet still be transformative. For manufacturers the initiative simply leverages what they are likely already doing on the retail side of their business - business processes such as assigning GTINs, marking cases with barcodes and data synchronization. Yet outward-facing business processes may require changes. Much of the foodservice industry still operates with Sales and Buyers exchanging proprietary item identifiers rather than GTINs (U.P.C.s or SSC-14s). For some manufacturers this may be as simple as ensuring that product literature and price lists also include the GTIN and for others it may mean ensuring that the GS1 GTIN allocation rules are understood by the foodservice side of the business.
Early participants in foodservice data synchronization are extremely happy with the results. The pilot manufacturers proved that their (retail) investments in data sync could be easily leveraged for foodservice and that the GDSN standards met the needs of the foodservice industry. While the pilot manufacturers had some work collecting data to meet the foodservice requirements they were leveraging their investments in GTIN rules, data governance to GS1 standards and their ERP and data sync infrastructure.