PiLog Standards Manager

"The person who knows the most about an item is the person who makes or sells it!"

In a globally connected economy there is growing awareness of the importance of unambiguous communication not only across platforms and applications but also between end users. As the power of the Internet – the primary tool for global communication – continues to grow, it is matched by increasingly well-funded and sophisticated efforts to use it to “manage” mind share or revenue share.

This paper discusses practical steps both parties can take today to leverage emerging open international standards for content ISO 22745 and ISO 8000. While the first standard provides guidelines for the implementation of the ECCMA Open Technical Dictionary (eOTD), a metadata registry of cataloging concepts used to create unambiguous, language independent descriptions of trading individuals, organizations, locations, goods and services, the second provides guidelines for the creation and maintenance of quality catalog data.

The following aspects need to be considered by any buyer or supplier organization in their drive for more effective procurement:

  • Buyers want to enable their suppliers so that the suppliers can provide the information they need.
  • Suppliers want to be empowered to control the distribution of their information.
  • Neither buyers nor suppliers want to support multiple formats.
  • Suppliers and buyers want to maintain their own catalogs in their own applications.
  • Suppliers and buyers use a common set of data elements with different subsets in a different order and with different definitions and names.
  • Hierarchies designed for analytical purposes are difficult to use in an operational environment by untrained cataloguers.
  • Classification version management can be a challenge.
  • FFT Spend is difficult to analyze and control.
  • Items are purchased on FFT whilst they are on the catalogue and in the store.
  • Items cannot be identified in ERP Material Master due to 40 Character description limitations.
  • Inventory visibility is a function of the ability to understand the terminology used by the individual that originally described the item. Characteristic data allows buyers to find items that meet their needs and it also allows suppliers to differentiate their products. Buyers are looking to build their buy-side catalogs from standardized Supplier hosted sell-side catalogs.

When developing e-commerce initiatives and strategies, most organizations today realize the benefits of open standards for content. These benefits include improved competition, inter connectivity and interoperability. In order to establish a true standard there must be processes and procedures that allow for equal participation among all interested parties. Standards help us to create marketing-oriented descriptions with searchable keywords and supporting attributes.

Benefits of Standards

The following benefits can be derived from Standardized Names & Structured Attributes

  • Avoidance of duplicate items entering inventory.
  • Items can be aggregated and compared, programmatically.
  • Use of coded reply tables accommodates multilingual environment.

Common characterization can provide benefits to Customer and Supplier:
Customer:

  • Provide easy way to limit search domain using characteristics.
  • Provide validating information for functional equivalent items.
  • Characteristic data allows buyers to find items that meet their needs (and understand what they bought).

Supplier:

  • Get items properly classified in customer’s Logistics Information System.
  • Allows product differentiation.

How Quality Content Can Affect Success For Suppliers

  • E-commerce requires the development of marketing-oriented content, versus internal operational-oriented content.
  • Use of internal operations content requires the customer to learn supplier systems and limits the number of buyers to “experts”.
  • E-commerce places procurement ability to the entire organizations desktops, requiring an easy to understand marketing oriented content.
  • Expanded product descriptions, making it easier to look up and identify items.
  • The addition of pictures, instilling customer confidence and reducing error and rework.
  • Eliminating uncommon abbreviations, allowing buyers to better understand supplier’s products.

PiLog eOTD Implementation Guides (PIGs)

The eOTD provides a set of recognized product categories as well as product attributes, defining values for each attribute. The attributes list is the longest provided for in a product category and can be used to generate a specific template. As a practical implementation of the eOTD, such templates can be applied per commodity, industry, buyer or supplier. These templates can also be submitted to ECCMA as eOTD Implementation Guides (EIGs).

What is an EIG?

An EIG is a selection of attributes per product category published in the eOTD as an implementation guide which can be submitted by any organization.

How can I access existing IGs?

PiLog has a proven list of PIGs available to customers for implementation in their master data solutions (click back to ‘master data solutions’)

Features

  • eOTD provides open, current international standards
  • Industry specific data to highlight important aspects per product category

Benefits

  • Clear communication between buyers and suppliers
  • Once-off content creation