The Branded Pantry

3 events this week prompt yet another commentary on the risks of using CPG product information in its current state.

1. A conversation with a colleague from a large grocery chain. They were talking about populating their emerging PIM/MDM systems with product information for a variety of applications across functional silos. When asked “with what will you populate this new system” the answer was “we will simply expect to get product information from the GDSN.”
2. A fourth announced (with many yet to be announced) product rating system for health and wellness. This one from a shelf tag supplier who has hired a nutritionist and assembled some product data from various sources.
3. Additional clarification from two retailers on their expectations for product ratings using the Overall Nutritional Quality Index (ONQI).

Precise, all-inclusive, up-to-date and homogeneous product data is a prerequisite for any frictionless inter or intra company business activities that concern products. This includes supply chain, demand chain and customer facing applications. Health and Wellness rating programs are the latest, but perhaps the most serious of these applications from a product data dependency point of view. Consumers are depending on their supermarkets to give them the straight scoop, the supermarkets are depending on the rating guru’s….and the guru’s are depending on the available product information.

The current state of product data collection (DIY and databases collected by third parties) were simply not designed to be precise, all-inclusive, up-to-date and homogeneous. They will not support uses such as Health and Wellness programs, as our studies have shown. Prime Consulting and I have studied this as have others (see “Its the data stupid” post on 1/3 below with its link to the original author at GXS) and have a pretty good approximation of just how much of the available data is of sufficient quality to be useful. If the product information is wrong, dated, incomplete or not correctly converted, the ratings will be wrong and the advice to the consumer will be wrong. GIGO lives!

More importantly we have identified the four primary areas in the current product introduction/revision process where information quality leakage occurs. Doug from Prime and I will co-author a blog on these four soon.