Effective product master data management is essential for online retail success.
As online retail continues to grow – and even become the norm – for increasingly tech-savvy consumers, the demand for accurate product content that’s complete, trustworthy and brand-verified is rising.
High-quality product content forms the basis of a great customer experience that delights shoppers while driving conversions. Along with a push for more quality in the product data they have access to, online buyers are also after greater quantity; they seek additional, richer information covering everything from specific nutritional values to detailed back-of-back labelling imagery.
This growing demand for rich, quality product content is reinforced by KPMG and GS1’s Unlocking the Value of Tomorrow’s Retail Report 2021: “In today’s age of information, retailers and suppliers will thrive or fail by how well they are able to harness information and respond to the increasing industry changes”.
However, the journey to providing trusted product content that ticks the boxes for both quality and quantity is fraught with challenges, ranging from complex regulatory compliance and frequently changing content requirements to a major disconnect in the way supply chain departments and marketing teams deal with product data.
The increasing complexity of providing quality product content
For supply chain businesses, effective product master data management has always been important for the standardisation of processes and adoption of GS1 data standards to increase efficiencies and lower the operational cost to serve customers.
However, in recent years, providing trusted, accurate product data has become increasingly complex for suppliers. This has been caused by a number of factors, including:
- Regulatory compliance requirements
Local and international regulations like the Food Standards Code, Country of Origin Labelling, Therapeutic Goods, UDI, and Eudamed put additional risk management responsibility on companies to deliver product information that is compliant and validated. - Multiple product data systems
Many suppliers use multiple systems for their product content across different departments, leading to complex, inefficient and inconsistent product data management processes. - Changing requirements for product content
In today’s fast-paced e-commerce environment, product data requirements change quickly and often, requiring suppliers to be agile and respond with speed to new product content requests.
Aligning supply chain and marketing product content is a challenge
Adding to the obstacles involved in providing trusted product content is the fact that supply chain and logistics functions have vastly different requirements to marketing departments when it comes to product information, making product content alignment a challenge for many businesses.
Individual departments often invest in fragmented data solutions that broaden the disconnect between Supply Chain and their Marketing counterparts, leading to confusion, inconsistencies, inefficiencies, duplicated work, and ultimately higher costs. What’s more, the quality of product content tends to be poor as a result, leading to a loss of sales and an increase in dissatisfied customers.
The golden record: A single source of product content truth
The solution – that is, finding a way to support regulatory processes while maximising the sales opportunity of every product – lies in consolidating disparate product records into one “clean” record. This consolidation of different SKU versions into a single, standardised product record becomes the golden record, providing a single source of truth for every product.
In order to achieve this coveted golden record, companies must address the challenge of combining product data that’s held across a raft of separate locations, from ERP to CRM, e-commerce to finance systems.
Achieving the golden record with end-to-end online content support
The quickest and most cost-effective method for suppliers to achieve this consolidation and effectively manage their master product data is through a managed data integration layer, such as Bureau+.
OCS facilitates a streamlined and simplified process for product data and online content maintenance, combining expertise in GDSN/NPC datapool publishing with proven experience in product data quality management.
By creating a consolidated golden record view of product data across the organisation, businesses are empowered to deliver accurate, current and complete product content that meets regulatory requirements, fulfils the product data requests of their retail partners, and delivers the best standard of customer experience to online shoppers.