Why we have launched Product Data Lake?
Sharing product data within business ecosystems has grown dramatically during the last years driven by the increased use of ecommerce and other customer self-service sales approaches.
Most initiatives around handling product data have been focused on internal processes and technology, and there are many viable solutions for that today. However, we have not seen many solutions that solves the problems in the exchange zones between trading partners. With the increasing demands for sharing ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) data besides traditional commercial data, the challenges are even bigger today than yesterday.
Most companies participating in cross company supply chains use spreadsheets for exchanging product data. Doing that is very cumbersome, error-prone and does in most cases not provide the needed data quality for having self-service ready product data.
Product Data Lake is the solution to end the hailstorms of spreadsheets and automate the sharing of product data.
What is Product Data Lake?
Product Data Lake is a cloud service for sharing product information (product data syndication) in the business ecosystems of manufacturers, distributors, merchants, marketplaces and large end users of product information.
Product Data Lake ensures product data quality in these ways:
- Completeness of product information by enabling trading partners to exchange product data in a uniform way
- Timeliness of product information by connecting trading partners in a process driven way
- Conformity of product information by encompassing various international standards for product information
- Consistency of product information by allowing upstream trading partners and downstream trading partners to interact with in-house structure of product information
- Accuracy of product information by ensuring transparency of product information across the supply chain
Find out more here.
How does Product Data Lake work?
We offer product data syndication collaboration by letting you as manufacturer push product information using your data standards and your preferred exchange method and letting you as a merchant pull product information using your data standards and your preferred exchange method.
Get involved:
Let product data flow easily between trading partners:
- As a manufacturer / brand owner, wholesaler / distributor or retailer / dealer you can let product data flow easily to and from trading partners by utilizing Product Data Lake.
- As a Product Information Management (PIM) professional, service provider or tool vendor you can support your clients in being successful with PIM and stretch your services to your clients trading partners. Learn about how to become a Product Data Lake ambassador here,
- Sign up to a free trial of Product Data Lake here.
Or get in contact right away:
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
How data consistency will be ensured among different data providers? What is the difference between the Product Data Lake and http://www.actualog.com in general?
Hi Kate. I think the Product Data Lake and Actualog complements each other very well in the space where PIM solutions don’t go, being the exchange zones between trading partners. The Product Data Lake is not so social I have to regret 😉 Actualog is more geared towards complex products I think. There will be a lot of synergy.
Henrik:
This sounds a lot like the work the GS1 has been doing for quite some time (see http://www.gs1.org/standards for example) or more specifically the GSDN (see http://www.gs1.org/gdsn for example).
Thanks for commenting James. That is true on a high level. The difference is equal to the difference between a traditional data warehouse and the data lake concept, which is growing in popularity within big data. In a data warehouse, you do the ETL before putting data in there. In a data lake you do the linking and transforming when data is consumed.
From recent experience working with product data outside highly regulated industries as pharmaceutics and in some degree food, there is a great need for an agile and process driven approach to sharing product data.
PS: From very recent experience, there is a need in pharmaceuticals as well, when we start looking at other things than active ingredients as the buy side of excipients, supplies, and spare parts.
Competing with GS1 ?
Hi Caspar. Yes and no. We are on the same mission but have different starting points. The product data lake resembles a social network where trading partners connect and exchange data between two ways of seeing product data that might use the same standards, but probably do not or only do it partly.
Trading Partners could subscribe to a Ipaas like Talend integration cloud. Assuming you have built this on a Hadoop distribution or Amazon Redshift or something like that this would be a great option for them to ensure that data integration standards are compatible.
Hi Paul. Thanks for commenting. I surely see users of Talend data integration and not at least Talend MDM services will have huge benefits of using the Product Data Lake when dealing with product master data. We do use Amazon Elastic Cloud for hosting. As data store we use MongoDB, but subscribers to the Product Data Lake can use every kind of own data store and interact with trading partners of their choice of data store.
My concern with data lakes per se is that they feel like a surrender to an easy option for the people putting data into the lake at the expense of those trying to take information out of the lake. The information wranglers face an every growing and thankless task.
Certain industries have managed to standardise their information. The air traffic industry has IATA and IANA standards. In Britain insurance companies have the ABI with a set of standard reference data. It has to be said that not all insurers comply with the ABI reference set.
I have noticed that companies that share data do so on a best-endeavours basis, often using resource outside of their IT department and it appears to be this that drives the route of using Excel.
A healthy company always has more ideas than it has resources to execute those ideas. The IT departments that could drive disciplined information exchange are consumed by the internal priorities of their business and information exchange is often quite low on the agenda. If we had a means of monetising data exchange it would help emphasise the needs for standardisation.
It feels as if there needs to be an open standard defined for product exchange, possibly aligned to the open data movement.
Thanks Dave. The reason of being for the Product Data Lake is exactly to be there in the process of going from a world with scattered standards for product information exchange to a state with a common accepted standard framework very much welcomed as being part of the open standard movement. That process will be long and will be done at different pace for each geography, industry and individual organization. In that space we need something that can work with and without a standard on the providing and receiving end. And that is the Product Data Lake.
I’m intrigued by this network. I’m looking forward to learning more & truly blessed to be a part of this mill. Let’s grow together & I encourage us to continue the supply chains. Business to business and truly yours, Mrs. Persia Canales-Troy Chocolathai Productions Prince George’s County, Maryland @persiababy1