The ongoing changes to your applications and infrastructure are often not within many Supply Chain or B2B leaders scope, so downline changes can impact your operations.  Data quality issues don’t stop at the product introduction process they carry on with every system change, new database column or field length change and you may not even know about it until it is too late. The wrong data can impact the initial translation, the compliance to your partner’s implementation requirements and even delay payment if they are caught.

End-to-End process management and data quality are key to ensuring the transactions are compliant and that your business gets paid.   As you look to roll out new changes to your ERP, it is vital that you run a complete test process against the production rules and processes, not just validate the structure and ability to create a successful translation event.   In the unlikely event that you do get a data quality issue that sneaks through, it is important that you have the capabilities to alert and engage technical and business owners in real-time to address the issues before they impact your business.

Today’s Question of the Week stems from Wednesday’s post about Data Synchronization. According the Drummond Group website, “GDSN (Global Data Synchronization Network) is a network of interoperable data pools and a global registry called the GS1 Global Registry, for communicating master data (Catalogue Item and Party) between trading partners.

While many support the concepts underlying the global data registry idea, certain concerns have been expressed about GDSN. A few of these concerns include:

• Existing standards and processes not incorporated with new systems
• Additional cost for standards participation and adoption
• Standards groups now compete with commercial service providers
• Limited adoption with a narrow focus*

What are your thoughts on GDSN?

*Content Credit: RIS/CGT White paper

The specification of XML Schema is quite complex and understanding it to make sense out of the XML Schema of an XML is no easier task. Ofcourse, some XML Schemas are much simpler than the other. However, many real life XML Schemas providing open standards tend to be quite complex. This is understandable because the open standards try to offer the most generic solutions that can hopefully cover all the possible scenarios. Hence, a purchase order document even in the best of the enterprise applications can span only a few dozens of tables, the OAGIS definition has more than two thousand elements (in most cases each element maps to a table when no shortcuts are taken).

VisualSchema.com is a website that provides these complex open standards XML Schemas as easily navigable HTML forms that people are familiar in enterprise applications making it easy even for the non-technical people to understand the XML Schema definitions.

At present, the site provides Visual Schemas for OAGIS and GS1’s GDSN standards.

Nestlé, for some time now an industry champion of data synchronisation and standardised product data, is touting the benefits it is seeing come out of the initiative.

Cited case in point: Nestlé’s move to bring the successful Polish brand Winiary and its range of soups, stocks, sauces and desserts to the UK (see article in the Guardian).

As reported in an article at Food Manufacture, Nestlé was able to use its 1SYNC global data synchronisation (GDS) capability to accelerate the UK launch of Winiary.

According to Chris Tyas, Supply Chain Director for Nestlé UK and Ireland, “We were able to get [Winiary] to market very quickly because we were able to extract all the data straight out of our systems in Poland.”

As the Winiary range was to be launched in the UK as-is, in the original Polish packaging with only an “over sticker” applied with details in English, this meant the Polish product data could be supplied as-is to UK retailers.

“The important thing in this is speed to market and we were able to get the product into the market place very, very quickly and when it was seen to be a success, to extend the range in June.”

Tyas, who is also vice chairman of the GS1 UK data synchronisation group, explained that “1Sync provides us with the ability to take information from our systems and translate those into any globally compliant tool, be it retailer specific or a public data pool like that of GS1.”

Last December, Nestlé Europe, Procter & Gamble and the Metro Group announced (pdf) the go-live of item data exchange through the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN), connecting together the SINFOS data pool used by Metro Group and the 1SYNC (formerly Transora and UCCnet) data pool used by Nestlé Europe and P&G.

As per http://www.gs1.org/docs/gpc/gpc_unspcs_integration_update.pdf , GPC is going to be integrated with UNSPSC. That’s probably understandable since definitely all the companies don’t want to invest effort twice to product classification. Well, since that’s going to happen by end of 2007, GPC Clouds are perhaps still applicable for a while.