A current poll on sharing product information with trading partners running on this blog has this question: As a manufacturer: What is Your Toughest Product Information Sharing Issue?
Some votes in the current standing has gone to this answer:
There is no viable industry standard for our kind of products
Indeed, having a standard that all your trading partners use too, will be Utopia.
This is however not the situation for most participants in supply chains. There are many standards out there, but each applicable for a certain group of products, geography or purpose as explained in the post Five Product Classification Standards.
At Product Data Lake we embrace all these standards. If you use the same standard in the same version as your trading partner, linking and transformation is easy. If you do not, you can use Product Data Lake to link and transform from your way to the way your trading partners handles product information. Learn more at Product Data Lake Documentation and Data Governance.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 