Tag Archives: Upload

Product Data Syndication Freedom for Manufacturers

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When working with product data syndication in supply chains the big pain is that data standards in use and the preferred exchange methods differ between supply chain participants.

As a manufacturer or brand owner you will have hundreds of re-sellers who probably have data standards different from you and most likely wants to exchange data in a different way than you do.

The aim of Product Data Lake is to take that pain away from both the manufacturer side and the merchant side. We offer product data syndication freedom by letting you as a manufacturer or brand owner push product information using your data standards and your preferred exchange method and letting your merchants pull product information using their data standards and their preferred exchange method.

This concept will free you from applying many different solutions to providing product information to your re-sellers. You will avoid errors. You will be able to automate the processes and you will be easy to do business with in the eyes of your trading partners.

The people who will use your products want to get complete product information when making the buying decision wherever they are in the supply chain.

Product Data SyndicationIf you want to know more: Get in contact here:

 

 

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How to end the standoff with your merchants

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Who should have the burden of lifting product information as you as a manufacturer have it to the way it is presented at the digital point-of-sales provided by your merchants? Often this seems to be stalled in a standoff as described in the post Passive vs Active Product Information Exchange.

Using spreadsheets

Most companies participating in cross company supply chains use spreadsheets for exchanging product data. Doing that is very cumbersome, error-prone and does in most cases not provide the needed data quality for providing self-service ready product data to your re-sellers.

The most common way of using spreadsheets for this is that a merchant gives each of his suppliers a spreadsheet with columns of attributes based on the merchants taxonomy to be filled out. As a supplier, you will typically be tasked with filling in a different spreadsheet from each of your downstream re-seller. This is very inefficient seen from a supplier perspective.

Deploying customer (and supplier) portals for product information

There is a tendency when deploying Product Information Management (PIM) solutions, that you may want to add a portal for your trading partners:

  • If you are a manufacturer, you could have a customer portal where your downstream re-sellers can fetch the nicely arranged product information that is the result of your PIM implementation.
  • If you are a merchant, you could have a supplier portal where your upstream suppliers can deliver their information nicely arranged according to your product information standards in your PIM implementation.

This is a death trap for both manufacturers and merchants, because:

  • As a trading manufacturer and merchant, you probably follow different standards, so one must obey to the other. The result is that one side will have a lot of manual and costly work to do to obey the strongest trading partner. Only a few will be the strongest all time.
  • If all manufacturers have a customer portal and all merchants have a supplier portal everyone will be waiting for the other and no product information will flow in the supply chains.

Standoff as upstream

The solution

At Product Data Lake we offer manufacturers and merchants an honorable way out of this standoff by offering Product Data Syndication Freedom.

 

Automatic for the People

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R.E.M._-_Automatic_for_the_PeopleThe title of this blog post is the title of, in my rapid eye movements, one the best albums ever: Automatic for the People by R.E.M., which came out 25 years ago in 1992.

It began in manufacturing

Automation began in the manufacturing industry. Since then automation has been part of most other industries. Not at least within Information Technology, automation is part of the promise in almost every initiative.

When automating stuff, we should always be aware of not just automating old bad processes. To the most extreme, as Michael Hammer said back in 1990: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.

However, some of the most successful companies today are companies born in the information age and delivering services that in a high degree automates processes of value to their customers based on working intensively with information technology.

How can we close the loop and bring that kind of modern automation back to where it began: In the manufacturing industry? The challenges of doing that was examined by Harri Juntunen in a guest blog post called Data Born Companies and the Rest of Us.

IT will come back to manufacturing

In all humbleness we want to be part of that endeavor at Product Data Lake. Therefore, we are setting up a Product Data Push solution for manufacturers, in order to solve one of most severe issues for manufacturers today, being a dysfunctional flow of product information out to whoever is managing the point of sales for the produced goods.

Automation is the end goal. But in order to get started, we accept upload of product information in whatever format, structure and state it is available in. We will then get it in shape to be pulled by retailers, etailers and other trading partners. We will use manual workforce for that and we will use Artificial Intelligence for that too. And in the end, it will be automatic for the people.