Product Identification
ECRA continues to work in partnership with GS1 Australia and New Zealand to provide the industry guidelines and standards for product identification. There is also a focus on data quality, synchronisation and harmonisation of data between trading partners.
GS1 Australia in conjunction with IBM and supported by AFGC and ECRA crunched the data of three leading Australian retailers and four key suppliers. The study suggests retailers are working with data that is inconsistent well over 80% of the time and the estimated cost of bad data is $1.035 billion over the next five years. Bad data has a severe impact on the industry in three main areas: Cost of manual workarounds to source missing data and correct errors 4%; Administrative shrinkage costs in areas such as ordering and invoicing 31%; Lost consumer sales through shelf stock outs 65%
The report highlights a number of data fields where error rates are problematic; draws conclusions on current industry work around practices; and most importantly delivers a call to action for the industry to adopt the Data Quality Framework (DQF).
In a study conducted during 2010, 44% non compliance in pallet labelling was identified across the industry. This significant level of failure is being seen by the retail trade as the biggest emerging issue in their respective supply chains. To assist the industry understand and address this issue GS1 Australia in partnership with ECRA developed a toolkit of useful information, Getting the Best out of Pallet Labels. Visit www.gs1au.org/industry/logistics_labelling.asp to access the full suite of tools available to assist your business with this issue.
The Australian and New Zealand Grocery Industry Guidelines for Numbering and Barcoding of Trade Items Not Sold at Retail Point of Sale was produced in 1999 to provide detail on how to number and bar code trade times using EAN.UCC the system. ECRA will partner with GS1 Australia to update these guidelines for the industry in 2011.
ECRA, GS1 Australia and GS1 New Zealand partnered with industry to examine the importance of accurate item and carton measurements. The report, Accurate Product Measurement - Items and Trade Units within the Australian and New Zealand Grocery Industry provides a concise summary of the key findings from this work including the ongoing maintenance of this data in master data files. It also offers practical information on measurement rules, standard tolerances, and data quality management.
A global group facilitated by Global Standards Management Process (GSMP), the pre-eminent worldwide collaborative forum where GS1 standards are built and maintained, has recently completed work on the development of Trading Partner Performance Management (TPPM). The TPPM provides comprehensive, unambiguous metrics and definitions that represent diverse trading partner performance measurement requirements and are precise enough that independent companies working with the same underlying data will derive the same metrics result. Given that the industry in Australasia does not currently embrace a standard set of KPIs and measures, ECRA will maintain a watching brief on global developments to ascertain the benefits of implementing such standards locally at a future point in time.;
The Data Integrity & Synchronisation – Building a foundation for industry collaboration report has been developed by a team of consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers, grocery retailers and wholesalers to facilitate progress towards full implementation of data integrity and synchronisation (DIS) across the Australasian grocery industry based on a single regional data pool, EANnet.
