Sunday, April 15, 2012

What are the Positives and Negatives of GDSN?


Lately I received the question whether I could quickly summarize the Positives and Negatives of GDSN.

Guys, I can tell you - that is not an easy task! So I tried my very best and this is what I came up with:







Positives:
  1. GDSN is the only global infrastructure to exchange product information
  2. It is used by many global suppliers and retailers
  3. It has a lot flexibility build in with the extension concept and extensions like the AVP-Extension
  4. There is a channel for communicating back from retailers to suppliers (the Catalog Item Confirmation message CIC)
  5. -Full coverage for all B2B processes in the verticals of FMCG and Grocery

Negatives:
  1. Implementation is complex for suppliers and retailers
  2. Although GDSN defines a message standard, this is only mandatory to be used between data pools. The communication between data source/recipient and the data pool is not standardized at all. This means every MDM/PIM/tool provider has to build an extra interface for each and every data pool he wants to connect his tool to. Therefore there are right now not that many tools which have build in GDSN capability.
  3. Typically GDSN does not cover all the requirements a retailer has regarding data synchronization. Therefore retailers are often asking for additional product information from suppliers on different ways. Very obvious is that GDSN today does not yet cover B2C data. And the question is whether the current GSMP process really can master the challenges of B2C data (category specific attributes).
  4. GDSN Pricesync is very complex and there is only one community which has adopted it (australia) up until now.
  5. There is a huge reengineering of the message format under way (Modular Item / GDSN 3.0) to give GDSN even more flexibility. There is not yet any date for putting that into production (rumours are saying, maybe 2015!?). This will put a lot of burden on all data pools and probably also on customers using GDSN today.
What do you think? Is that a fair summary? Do you have any extra Positives or Negatives?

Looking forward to your comments!