Interenterprise Master Data Management is on the rise as reported in the post Watch Out for Interenterprise MDM. Interenterprise MDM is about how organizations can collaborate by sharing master data with business partners in order to optimize own master data and create new data driven revenue models together with business partners.
One of the most obvious places to start with Interenterprise MDM is Product Data Syndication (PDS). While PDS until now has been mostly applied when syndicating product data to marketplaces there is a huge potential in streamlining the flow of product from manufacturers to merchants and end users of product information.
Inbound and Outbound Product Data Syndication
There are two scenarios in interenterprise Product Data Syndication:
- Outbound, where your organization as being part of a supply chain will provide product information to your range of customers. The challenge is that with no PDS functionality in between you must cater for many (hundreds or thousands) different structures, formats, taxonomies and exchange methods requested by your customers.
- Inbound, where your organization as being part of a supply chain will receive product information from your range of suppliers. The challenge is that with no PDS functionality in between you must cater for many (hundreds or thousands) different structures, formats, taxonomies and exchange methods coming in.
Learn more in the post Inbound and Outbound Product Data Syndication.
4 Main Use Cases for Collaborative PDS
There are these four main use cases for exchanging product data in supply chains:
- Exchanging product data for resell products where manufacturers and brands are forwarding product information to the end point-of-sale at a merchant. With the rise of online sales both in business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) the buying decisions are self-service based, which means a dramatic increase in the demand for product data throughput.
- Exchanging product data for raw materials and packaging. Here there is a rising demand for automating the quality assurance process, blending processes in organic production and controlling the sustainability related data by data lineage capabilities.
- Exchanging product data for parts used in MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operation). As these parts are becoming components of the Industry 4.0 / Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) wave, there will be a drastic demand for providing rich product information when delivering these parts.
- Exchanging product data for indirect products, where upcoming use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in all procurement activities also will lead to requirements for availability of product information in this use case.
Learn more in the post 4 Supplier Product Data Onboarding Scenarios.
Collaborative PDS at Work
In the Product Data Lake venture I am working on now, we have made a framework – and a piece of Software as a Service – that is able to leverage the concepts of inbound and outbound PDS and enable the four mentioned use cases for product data exchange.
The framework is based on reusing popular product data classifications (as GPC, UNSPSC, ETIM, eClass, ISO) and attribute requirement standards (as ETIM and eClass). Also, trading partners can use their preferred data exchange method (FTP file drop – as for example BMEcat, API or plain import/export) on each side.
All in all, the big win is that each upstream provider (typically a manufacturer / brand) can upload one uniform product catalogue to the Product Data Lake and each downstream receiver (a merchant or user organization) can download a uniform product catalogues covering all suppliers.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 