Category Archives: Data Quality

Five Product Classification Standards

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When working with Product Master Data Management (MDM) and Product Information Management (PIM) one important facet is classification of products. You can use your own internal classification(s), being product grouping and hierarchy management, within your organization and/or you can use one or several external classification standards.

Five External Standards

Some of the external standards I have come across are:

UNSPSC

The United Nations Standard Products and Services Code® (UNSPSC®), managed by GS1 US™ for the UN Development Programme (UNDP), is an open, global, multi-sector standard for classification of products and services. This standard is often used in public tenders and at some marketplaces.

GPC

GS1 has created a separate standard classification named GPC (Global Product Classification) within its network synchronization called the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN).

Commodity Codes / Harmonized System (HS) Codes

Commodity codes, lately being worldwide harmonized and harmonised, represent the key classifier in international trade. They determine customs duties, import and export rules and restrictions as well as documentation requirements. National statistical bureaus may require these codes from businesses doing foreign trade.

eClass

eCl@ss is a cross-industry product data standard for classification and description of products and services emphasizing on being a ISO/IEC compliant industry standard nationally and internationally. The classification guides the eCl@ss standard for product attributes (in eClass called properties) that are needed for a product with a given classification.

ETIM

ETIM develops and manages a worldwide uniform classification for technical products. This classification guides the ETIM standard for product attributes (in ETIM called features) that are needed for a product with a given classification.

pdl-whyThe Competition and The Neutral Hub

If you click on the links to some of these standards you may notice that they are actually competing against each other in the way they represent themselves.

At Product Data Lake we are the neutral hub in the middle of everyone. We cover your internal grouping and tagging to any external standard. Our roadmap includes more close integration to the various external standards embracing both product classification and product attribute requirements in multiple languages where provided. We do that with the aim of letting you exchange product information with your trading partners, who probably do the classification differently from you.

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Self-service Ready Product Data

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The increased use of self-service based sales approaches as in ecommerce has put a lot of pressure on cross company supply chains. Besides handling the logistics and controlling pricing, you also have to take care of a huge amount of product data and digital assets describing the goods.

You may divide product information into these five levels:

Product Information Levels

Please learn more about the five levels of product information, including how hierarchies, pricing and logistics fits in, by visiting the product information castle.

Level 4 in this model is self-service product data being:

  • Product attributes, also sometimes called product properties or product features. These are up to thousands of different data elements that describes a product. Some are very common for most products like height, length, weight and colour. Some are very specific to the product category. This challenge is actually the reason of being for dedicated Product Information Management (PIM) solutions.
  • Basic product relations are the links between a product and other products like a product that have several different accessories that goes with the product or a product being a successor of another now decommissioned product.
  • Standard digital assets are documents like installation guides, line drawings and data sheets.

These are the product data that helps the end customer comparing products and making an objective choice when buying a product for a specific purpose of use. These data are also helpful in answering the questions a buyer may have when making a purchase.

Every piece of data belonging to any level of product information may be forwarded through the cross company supply chain from the manufacturer to the end seller. Self-service product data are however the data that most obviously will do so.

In order to support end customer self-service when producing, distributing and selling goods you must establish a process driven service that automates the introduction of new products with extensive product data, the inclusion of new kinds of product data and updates to those data. You must be a digitalized member of your business ecosystem. The modern solution for that is the Product Data Lake.

Chinese Whispers and Data Quality

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There is a game called Chinese Whispers or Broken Telephone or some other names. In that game, one person whispers a message to another person. The message is passed through a line of people until the last player announces the message to the entire group. At that point the message is often quite different or very shortened. The reasons for that is human unreliability including how we put our own perceptions and filters into a message.

When working with data quality you often see the same phenomenon when data is passed through a chain. One area I have observed in recent years is within Product Information Management (PIM). Here the chain is not just the data chain within a given company but the whole data chain in ecosystems of manufacturers, distributors, retailers and end users.

While Product Information Management (PIM) solutions and Product Master Data Management (Product MDM) solutions – if there is a difference – address the issues within a given company, we haven’t seen adequate solutions for solving the problem in the exchange zones between trading partners.

Broken data supply chain

From what I have seen the solutions that upstream providers of product data work with and the solutions that downstream receivers of product data work with will not go well together.

Consequently, I am right now working with a solution to end Chinese whispers in product data supply chains. Check out the Product Data Lake.