The analyst firm Ventana Research recently made a report called The Next Generation of Product Information Management with the subtitle Maximizing the Potential Value of Products for Customers and Suppliers.
One, perhaps shocking, number mentioned in the report is that there is “room for improvement, as only 5 percent of organizations share all their product data electronically with supply chain partners”.
However, this resonates very well with my experience, as it has been hard to find a good way to share all kind of product information electronically with all your trading partners, as:
- The most common used way today is exchanging spreadsheets, which is cumbersome and error prone and therefore many companies experience that it simply is not done or only done partly and certainly not timely.
- Using consensus data pools (eg GS1 GDSN) only covers a fraction of product groups and product data elements with varying penetration and coverage in different geographies
- Providing supplier product data portals (and customer product data portals) is a flawed one-sided concept as discussed in the post PIM Supplier Portals: Are They Good or Bad?
This is the reason why Product Data Lake has been launched.
You can get an 18 pager write up of the research report free from Stibo Systems here.
PS: If you are a PIM solution vendor or a PIM system integrator you can, as a legal entity, help with and gain from filling this room by becoming a Product Data Lake Commissioner.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 