Out of Sync

Computerworld - Radio frequency identification may be grabbing headlines as the hot technology in the retail supply chain. But another mammoth initiative was gathering steam long before Wal-Mart Stores Inc. asked its suppliers to affix RFID tags to pallets and cases.

Wal-Mart and more than two dozen retailers, including The Home Depot Inc., Lowe's Companies Inc., Ace Hardware Corp. and grocers Albertsons Inc. and Wegmans Food Markets Inc., have been preaching the merits of data synchronization to help rid their supply chains of error-infested documents and lengthy product introductions. They've asked suppliers to submit standards-based data to a centralized global directory, which in January will be known as the GS1 Global Registry.

Having accurate, updated data fed into their master product files means retailers won't have to waste time reconciling errors in purchase orders and invoices. And data accuracy is also a critical step in creating the foundation for RFID, when large volumes of information will be flowing fast and furiously through the supply chain.

"You have to have good data," says Kathryn Cullen, a technology specialist at Kurt Salmon Associates Inc., a retail and consumer products consultancy in Atlanta. "Otherwise, you're defeating the point of speeding up data."

But like RFID, data synchronization projects are rife with challenges for retailers and their suppliers. In a recent Computerworld survey of 25 project managers, about a third said they're having difficulty mustering the necessary internal resources for data synchronization products, in some cases because the near-term ROI is elusive.

Andrew White, an analyst at Gartner Inc., estimates that only 5% of retailers have launched item synchronization efforts, the first step in data synchronization. Some of the manufacturers that have worked to comply with the big retailers' directives are having difficulty finding other retailers ready to undertake a synchronization project with them, he adds. That makes it tough to recoup compliance costs and move on to the next phase, when the companies will share more extensive product and price attribute data that should bring a bigger payoff, White says.

Zeke Duge, CIO at Smart & Final Inc.

Dirty Data

But today, "mess" is a word that's often used to characterize the state of the data in the internal systems of retailers and suppliers. It's not uncommon to find the same product referred to in different ways in multiple files, obsolete item numbers lingering for years and product attributes, such as dimensions or the number of items in a pack, defined inconsistently from one company to the next.