Retailer GDS Implementation: US vs. Europe

In the last few month I worked with couple european retailers and also with a couple of US retailers on GDSN and MDM.

My perception was that US Retailers where quite ahead of their European colleagues. Not all of them because also in US there are a lot of retailers who have not yet started any GDS Initiative nor a MDM Initiative.

But comparing the most advanced (regarding GDS and MDM implementation) retailers in Europe and in US, US seems to me to be more advanced.

What is the difference?

European retailers seem to have as their vision “I want to do GDS to receive suppliers product data electronically.”. US retailers seem to have a different vision “I want to replace my paper base product introduction and change process by an electronic process”.

You think there is no real difference in the outcome?

Wrong. It is. The goal in US is not to do GDSN but to replace paper based processes. In Europe the goal is to do GDSN and thereby hoping to replace paper based processes.

What I saw with the retailers I worked with in US was that they all launched a MDM program. This was a lot about setting up an organization and processes to manage their item master data. To receive the data from their suppliers they not only implemented GDSN but they also implemented Web portals where suppliers can manually maintain item data free of charge. This led to the comfortable situation that they could receive 100% of their product data electronically by mandating to deliver item data either via GDSN or via their Web portal.

In Europe retailers engaged heavily into community alignment and standards development (which btw. led to all those country specific requirements and standards) but only implemented GDS (and to be honest, they first all developed country specific data pools and later on tried to switch to GDSN). No free portal for their suppliers, nor – in many cases – a dedicated MDM program to ensure data quality. With only having GDS as a means to deliver item data electronically, retailers in Europe are not able to mandate the usage of GDS. In the end successful retailers in Europe might only sync item data with 10-15% of their suppliers, and with the rest of their suppliers there are still manual, often paper based processes in place.

This explains why retailers in US are typically much happier with GDSN implementation than their European counterparts although adoption of GDSN does not significantly differ in US and Europe. In both regions it is not as good as expected by all participants.

Do not get me wrong.

I am not suggesting to retailers to implement their proprietary portals just to be able to offer item maintenance for free to their suppliers. This is a functionality which today is offered typically by data pools. Those offerings are more standards compliant and should be a lot cheaper than it is for a retailer to implement it on their own.

So I would suggest to retailers who are struggling with their GDSN implementation and their realized benefits that they should define and implement a MDM program and their vision has to be to "Replace manual item listing and maintenance process by  automated data synchronisation processes".