Over the past several months there's been a growing interest from Retailers and Grocers that are considering automating the process of the cleansing of their item files and/or the creation and setup of new products. In fact there are several industries that are collaborating in committees, one being the Food Service community. I know that companies like Sysco, US Foodservice, Dot Foods, Food Service of America Foodservice distributors are working toward using GDSN similar to what the Electronics industry did earlier. What's interesting about this to me is that you'd think that having clean data or lack thereof would have been one of the first steps even before sending orders electronically. But interestingly enough there have only been a few companies that have taken this step first. Read more...

Over the years you have read articles from me on knowing the data type that your trading partners are supporting with others, and to collaborate with these partners to make sure that an initiative being rolled out adds value to both sides. Which Standards to use (VICS, UCS, EDIFACT, straight X12, etc.). Which transactions (Is an order an 850 or an 875 or an EDIFACT ORDRS)? And being consistent with the use of tags, nodes, Segments, elements etc for your industry. These are all extremely important to the success of a electronic trading partner relationship. Read more...

If you're like many companies your year end is also the end of the calendar year. With the approaching new year comes new budgets and new Goals and Objectives. For some retailers, we'll start to see new store openings increase, but for most you'll continue to look within your organizations to continue to shrink the cost of operations, and that will likely include changes or continued expansion of Supply Chain initiatives and Electronic Trading. As you plan your Strategy for 2011 you may want to consider some of the things that I've been writing on over the last year. To refresh your memory below are considerations I'd expect you'd "noodle" over the following: Read more...