How Much Does Bad Product Data Cost You Today?

Introduction

If you still receive incorrect, incomplete, inadequate product data from your supply chain partners, this “bad” data is costing you and your suppliers money every day.

The True Costs of Bad Product Data

  1. Inefficient Operations: Inaccurate or incomplete product data can lead to operational inefficiencies. For instance, incorrect dimensions or weight information can result in logistical challenges, leading to delays, incorrect order fulfillment, and higher shipping costs. Inaccurate product descriptions can confuse customers, resulting in increased customer service inquiries and potential order returns.

  2. Lost Sales Opportunities: Consumers rely heavily on accurate and detailed product information to make purchasing decisions. If product data is inconsistent or incomplete across sales channels, customers may abandon their purchase or seek alternatives from competitors who provide better information. This can lead to missed sales opportunities and decreased market share.

  3. Increased Product Returns: Inaccurate or incomplete product data can contribute to higher product return rates. Customers may receive products that do not match their expectations due to incorrect specifications or misleading descriptions. This results in additional costs for reverse logistics, restocking, and potential damage to brand reputation.

  4. Data Management Overhead: In the absence of standardized and automated data management processes, businesses spend significant time and resources manually correcting and validating product data. This diverts resources from strategic initiatives, slows down time-to-market, and increases the risk of errors.

  • Imagine that you could continuously align product data and digital content with ALL your supply chain partners.
  • Imagine that you could receive automatic updates nightly from all your trading partners for all SKUs (changes, deletions & new SKUs).
  • Imagine that all the product data attributes you require for all similar products would be the same from all suppliers.
  • Imagine that you would receive a separate, discreet data record for each level of packaging for each SKU.
  • Imagine that all the digital content you require would be included in each data record using URL tags.

A CAP Gemini study demonstrated that adopting and implementing a global data synchronization program would lead to a 1% to 3% savings in supply chain costs for retailers. Long-term benefits were expected to be even greater. The reality has been just that.….and better still, many of your suppliers are already able to supply this content to you using a global data content network. This network exists and is known as the GDSN (Global Data Synchronization Network). 1500 global demand parties like your company use the GDSN today to obtain all their product content from 40,000 GDSN registered suppliers.

GDSN Driving Data Excellence

The Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) is a worldwide network that facilitates the exchange of standardized and synchronized product data between trading partners. GDSN ensures that accurate and consistent product information is shared across the supply chain in real time, enhancing data quality and integrity.

Here’s how GDSN can help businesses improve their product data management:

  1. Data Accuracy and Consistency: GDSN enforces data standards, ensuring that product information is accurate, up-to-date, and consistent across all trading partners. It eliminates manual data entry and reduces the risk of errors, leading to improved data quality and reliability.

  2. Streamlined Data Exchange: GDSN provides a centralized platform for data exchange, simplifying the process of sharing and updating product data with trading partners. It eliminates the need for multiple data formats and manual data synchronization, saving time and reducing administrative overhead.

  3. Increased Efficiency and Speed to Market: By automating data synchronization, GDSN enables faster and more efficient product launches. It reduces the time required to onboard new products, update existing data, and ensure data compliance, leading to accelerated time-to-market and competitive advantage.

  4. Enhanced Customer Experience: With accurate and comprehensive product data available across sales channels, GDSN helps businesses deliver consistent and reliable product information to customers. This improves the overall customer experience, builds trust, and increases customer satisfaction.

  5. Improved Supply Chain Visibility: GDSN provides real-time visibility into product data, enabling better inventory management, demand forecasting, and order fulfillment. It facilitates efficient collaboration between trading partners, enhancing supply chain visibility and responsiveness.

Conclusion

The cost of bad product data is a significant concern for businesses, impacting efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall profitability. Investing in solutions like the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) becomes imperative to mitigate these costs. GDSN offers a standardized and efficient way to synchronize product data across the supply chain, reducing errors, enhancing data accuracy, and ultimately improving the bottom line. Recognizing the true cost of bad product data underscores the importance of adopting robust solutions to ensure data quality and integrity.

Contact Commport today and we will confirm how many of your trading partners are registered in the GDSN today and explain how easy it is to use the GDSN.

Find out more about the GDSN.

Frequently Asked Questions

Bad product data can lead to costly errors, such as shipping the wrong products, delays in order fulfillment, and increased customer dissatisfaction. It can also result in financial losses due to returns, chargebacks, and potential damage to a company’s reputation.

Bad product data hampers supply chain efficiency by causing disruptions in order processing, inventory management, and logistics. Inaccurate information can lead to stockouts, overstock situations, and inefficiencies in the overall supply chain workflow.

Data synchronization, especially through solutions like GDSN, ensures that product information is consistent and up-to-date across all stakeholders in the supply chain. This consistency improves communication, reduces errors, and enhances overall efficiency in managing product data.

GDSN is designed to benefit businesses of all sizes. While larger enterprises may have more extensive product data, small businesses can leverage GDSN to improve data accuracy, streamline processes, and enhance collaboration with trading partners, contributing to overall efficiency.

GDSN contributes to cost savings by reducing errors in product data, which can lead to fewer returns, chargebacks, and operational inefficiencies. The standardized data exchange facilitated by GDSN streamlines processes, lowers the risk of errors, and ultimately saves businesses money in various aspects of their operations.

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