Easy Synchronization

This year's U-Connect 09 and 1SYNC User Group Conference were a great success. There were many excellent sessions and it was a great opportunity to meet many of our customers, partners and prospective customers.

A key session was the retailer panel which included Wal-Mart, Lowe's, AAFES, McLane, SuperValu and Wakefern. The retailers went over the status of their current initiatives and some of the key challenges they face.

Webco Alaska handles distribution for many large manufacturers to Wal-Mart and other retailers in the state of Alaska. Being a vendor-of-record, Webco Alaska started using Sync/PDI for Distributors at the beginning of this year and is the most recent addition to 1SYNC's "Retailers/Distributors in Production" list.

With several vendors in SKU intensive categories like Cosmetics and Health & Beauty Aids, Webco Alaska had a real chore in manually re-keying product information from manufacturers' data sheets into Wal-Mart's systems. "Not only is the new data sync system faster and more accurate but Sync/PDI will really cut down our effort.  The products we distribute have a lot of SKU's and they change frequently." commented  Denise Potter, VP of Sales at Webco Alaska.

Lowe's recently announced new validations designed to improve the quality and consistency of brand information in Lowe's systems including Lowes.com. Fortunately Sync/PDI makes it easy for vendors to check that their brand information adheres to the new Lowe's rules.

With this new initiative Lowe's will be ensuring that the vendor's brand field is consistent spelling, punctuation, and any abbreviations. Lowe's now has a master list of valid "brands" and will fail new or changed listings if the brand is not on the master list.

This year's Hardlines Technology Forum brought together supply chain professionals in the hardlines industry to collaborate with leading retailers - Lowe's, Home Depot, Do-It-Best and AAFES. Highlights of the forum included Lowe's announcing that they have 96% of their item volume synchronized.

Ever wonder what retailers are doing with all the different data attributes vendors provide them via GDSN? Wakefern is continuing to roll-out GDSN to their vendors and as part of this initiative they have shared how they use the data.