CPG Sound Off: Merger of Transora, UCCnet Drives Need for Single Version of Product Truth - Phil Friedman, Executive Vice-president Sales and Marketing

During my 25 plus years of working in or providing enabling solutions to the CPG industry, I never heard senior executives more frustrated regarding the current investment in collaborative based IT solutions. They ask, “Where is the clear vision that integrates and positions the new paradigm for supporting more demanding customer requirements, merging standards and trading pool organizations and where is the ROI for such technology investments as RFID?” Given this investment, how do I manage by business with that proverbial “Single Version of the Truth”.

Collaborative commerce is like a stool with four legs. All four legs are required to drive the fundamental paradigm shift for how manufacturers and retailers conduct business and the stability needed to support ongoing business processes.

It is my belief the recent announcement of the pending merger between Transora and UCCNet is clearly the next phase of the Consumer Packaged Goods evolution in collaborative alignment with key trading partners. What it provides is the coupling of standards with key business processes and underlying technology solutions to deploy and deliver capabilities that can drive top line growth while reducing the cost and complexity of dealing with a significant number of trading partner requirements.

The vision can best be viewed as an age old four legged stool. Build only three and you fall over, build all four and you provide a useful solution and one that can carry more weight than the sum of the individual legs.

• Leg one: UCCNet (GS1) with its well accepted and globally adopted item synchronization standards for product identification provides the common speak for achieving supply chain efficiency and driving top line growth.
• Leg two: Transora with its recognized global data pool enabling collaboration processes and solutions provides the consistent framework for optimizing costs while building true partner collaboration. The addition of Transora to GS1 is needed to better enable collaboration processes and solutions for optimizing costs amongst trading partners. This market consolidation though, only just begins to drive the fundamental paradigm shift for how manufacturers and retailers electronically conduct business.
• Leg three: Exploitation of ePC and RFID as its transport mechanism. RFID, even with its know technology weaknesses, will become the vehicle to align velocity to needed information with the speed of the business driving the next level of supply chain collaboration and improving operational relationships encompassing trade and promotion management and settlement. What needs to be done, is to integrate the capabilities ePC/RFID into core business processes and application solutions provide the value proposition that drives real and measurable ROI’s, by focusing on driving right product, right place, right time and at the right cost.
• Leg four: Product Information Management (PIM) provides the missing ingredient of data integrity and provides the stable data platform needed for long term sustainability needed to support evolving collaboration standards. Most manufacturers and retailers continue though to run multiple and disparate applications within their enterprise, each business silo with a separate and unique copy of their own version of product information. These silo approaches will increasing become exposed as being unmovable obstacles for companies looking to create a single version of product truth. Changes in traditional business processes will be required to adopt and process in the new word of electronic commerce.

The solution is the deployment of a product Information management (PIM) solution for creating an environment that facilitates “a single version of the product truth”. When a PIM solution is deployed and integrated into the processes and applications of the business, it allows business management to have confidence in the provided information based decision process and enables four key benefits:

• Drives growth by improving customer service, which significantly increases opportunities for true collaboration.
• Creates and maintains a shared central repository of accurate product information that can be shared by all your internal systems, allowing you to get more value from your IT investment.
• Meets retailer mandates around data synchronization and RFID while improving supply chain efficiencies and, ultimately, increasing revenue.
• Streamlines new product introductions, using information from all key functional areas (e.g., R&D, Logistics, Brand Marketing, Sales, Finance, Purchasing, etc.).