The
largest global exchanges for retailers and manufacturers have
announced details of their long-awaited interoperability project,
which aims to enable closer links between supply chain
partners.
The WorldWide
Retail Exchange and Transora this week said they have linked their
Global Data Synchronization (GDS) systems, a move they claimed
would improve data quality along companies’ supply chains.
GDS is defined as
the alignment of all product, company and location master data,
ensuring that each product is described correctly throughout the
supply chain.
The process should
allow the development of more collaborative business processes,
such as CPFR (collaborative planning forecasting and replenishment)
for companies of all sizes.
Sally Herbert,
chief commercial officer at the WWRE, said, “Our priority has
always been to connect our members with their trading partners.
With the interoperability project, we will provide retailers with
access to product data from many of the world’s largest global
manufacturers.”
Improving data
quality is likely to be the number-one priority for a large number
of retailers and manufacturers with the increasing use of supply
chain technologies such as RFID, according to Nick Parnaby, chief
marketing officer at the WWRE.
“Data quality is
the one focus for many projects now,” he said. “Most people that
have done RFID projects, for example, have realised that they had
to go back and sort out data synchronisation first.”
There has been
talk of linking WWRE and Transora for a number of years, but the
interoperability has not been viable previously because retailers
were not ready for GDS, Parnaby said
The two exchanges
have had “three of four discussions” about merging fully since
2001, but they felt interoperability was the preferable route as
the underlying technology is different, he added.