NEMA: Electro Industry October 2010 - 18

electroindustry news
ŰŰPreparingŰforŰtheŰFutureŰofŰGlobalŰeCommerceŰStandards
By Sonia Coleman Some manufacturing leaders may relegate data standards implementation to the IT basement, but the reality is that these bits of attributed information may hold the keys to a company’s future success. End-user customers and distributors continue to clamor for more detailed product information for specification and marketing purposes. Precious time is wasted converting data to numerous formats, errors proliferate, and even a wrong acronym can cause a digital train wreck. The solution? Global eCommerce standards. “Our customers are demanding more product information because they need it to make buying decisions,” said Jason Archbold, catalog marketing specialist for Border States Electric. “The better the marketing information is on a product, the easier it is to get that product line-up correct. Right now, it’s a challenge. Having standardized attributes would make the whole process from manufacturer to end customer more efficient and reliable.” eCommerce standards can also remove many inefficiencies in data translation. “Distributors are sending out enriched data requests to multiple manufacturers, and we’re receiving them from many distributors. If we can both speak the same language, it eliminates a large amount of waste in the process of conveying information from business to business,” said Michael Johnson, marketing analyst for Pentair Technical Products. a schema For attributed data In response to the need for more robust product data, the IDEA Industry Standards Committee (ISC) has developed the Electrical Industry Attribute Schema to help sell products more effectively. This tool facilitates a supply partner’s ability to provide standardized marketing information in Industry Data Warehouse (IDW), IDEA’s data synchronization platform. The schema is based on the global, nonproprietary United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) for product categorization. “We’re constantly working to keep up with global and industry needs. We operate as a community of manufacturers and distributors to foresee where we need to be with our product data,” said Angela LiVolsi, data synchronization specialist for Philips Lighting Company and member of the ISC. The release of this industry-owned schema is the latest of many standards efforts overseen by IDEA since it became authorized to develop and maintain the electrical portion of the UNSPSC by the standards body GS1 US, in 2004. Through the standards committee, more than 30 electrical distributor and manufacturer companies worked together to create the industry schema, developing as many as 27 attributes or product descriptors for each category. “With UNSPSC codes as the base, and the product descriptor attributes that provide more specific detail for descriptions, you can get down to the very minute differences between products within a family,” said Ms. LiVolsi. reduced errors, increased sales Since it standardizes detailed product information, the UNSPSC-based schema offers many benefits to manufacturers, distributors, and end users. “An obvious benefit to implementing the UNSPSC standards is error reduction,” said Dawn Wright-Perry, retail services manager for Milbank. “This will improve all the processes through the entire supply chain. It will also give manufacturers the ability to have consistent, clean data for all their products, as well as provide that data a lot faster and easier to distributors.” “This is going to take us beyond transactional data to catalog data, and for distributors, providing this information in a standardized format increases the quality and makes it easier to use,” said Mr. Archbold. For example, Border States has been building product marketing information themselves, using manufacturer-owned online and print catalogs as well as gathering bits and pieces of information from other sources. “Now that this product information is residing in a platform, it’s going to be more accessible and efficient for us to continue to build these products into our online catalog,” he said. “But beyond that, I can also trust the data much more because the manufacturer has provided it. If it’s correct, then we’re just reformatting and redisplaying it, as opposed to trying to reenter the data.” As a result, the level of individual manufacturer support of IDW and the product schema initiative support are important factors that distributors like Border States consider when evaluating manufacturer partners’ performance. “The level of IDW support is an expectation that complements other NAED (National Association of Electrical Distributors) Supply Chain Scorecard

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October 2010

NEMA: Electro Industry October 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NEMA: Electro Industry October 2010