* Mega-retailers spark supply chain registry momentum
When you get retail giants such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Albertsons and Ace Hardware to support a massive industry-standard way of doing business – people listen.
But that’s pretty much what the UCCnet effort has done. Never heard of it? If your company’s functions are related at all to retail, you will. Our author John Fontana writes that UCCnet is a global registry of product data, such as item number, that lets retailers and their supplier partners build a master catalog of products they buy and sell. In essence, it is like a telephone directory for every product available and guarantees, for instance, that when a store orders a case of paper towels that is what it gets. UCCnet also is dynamic and if suppliers change any of the 151 possible attributes describing a product in UCCnet’s GLOBALregistry, retailers are notified in near real time eliminating many supply chain hiccups.
The driving idea behind UCCnet is to eliminate expensive errors in invoicing, purchase orders, product delivery and scanning accuracy because product data is obsolete or inaccurate.
UCCnet aims to change that by teaming two standards, the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), a globally unique product number, and the Global Location Number (GLN), which identifies shipping and receiving points.
The combination will not only streamline product data synchronization but create a foundation for more significant e-commerce tools such as scan-based trading, where suppliers don’t get paid until a product is scanned and purchased by a customer, and collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment.
