Why is GDSN ignored by PIM vendors?

Lately I had a very intensive discussion  on GDSN with one of the major PIM software producer. They were really interested to see whether GDSN could bring them any additional business and if there were relevant customers being in the need of GDSN support in a PIM solution.

They got very detailed presentations on GS1 activities in the Retail & CPG and in the Healthcare space. And they were also presented the actual GDSN growth figures and actually it was tried everything to sell them the relevance of GDSN for their PIM business. They even talked to major retailers using GDSN on their experience and advice and also to some data pools.

Finally they took some time to evaluate what was presented to them and draw some conclusions for their business. Actually I was quite surprised with their key conclusions:

1. Datapools only have relevance in Europe and in US. This really puzzled me because at least Australia is one of the most advanced GDSN communities with the highest adoption rates. But looking at most of the other countries - even within Europe - GDSN is not that much adopted and still manual data exchange (even on paper) is the most spread way of data synchronisation. Although the adoption rate is continuously growing as you can see from the Global Registry Statistics.
   
   
2. The data is not maintained sufficiently and the data quality is considered to be very low.
   In this case this is really a two-sided issue. First I think bad data quality in GDSN data pools is really one of the badest myths at all. In all cases where I did comparisons between retailer product data and the data in a data pool the retailer data was much worse then the data in the data pool. The data in the data pool actually always was in quite a good shape. This is also supported by all recent studies like the GS1 UK datacrunch report or the report from GS1 Belgium.
   The second side of the issue in this case is that their customers are mainly also in the ecommerce space and what you need there is the marketing and sales information on products and this is today really not available in the GDSN.
   It really seems to be a challenge within the GSMP process to get a standard developed for marketing and sales relevant (or let's use the new hype term "B2C") data. If you look for example at Consumer Electronics. The first hints on additional attributes and an additional standard I have found in 2008. And now in 2011 we are getting calls to action to work on the requirements for Consumer Electronics ... For me that does not look convincing too ...
   
   
3. Data enrichment is not covered within the GDSN
   What they meant by "data enrichement" is to add B2C data to the data if that is not available directly from any internal source at the supplier.
   I think here they are going wrong. In my perception the PIM of a retailer should offer a supplier portal where suppliers can enrich their data manually. Also data pools like SA2 Worldsync are starting to offer such functionalities based on their data pools.
   As GDSN is "only" a protocol between data pools (and in some respect between a data source and a data recipient and its corresponding data pool) it does not deal with "manual" data enrichment processes by concept.
   
   
4. They consider GDSN only as  a infrastructure side topic
   Here I think they are really making a big mistake. GDSN is not only about publishing the data to  a data recipient (retailer) but it is also about communication with the retailer (think of the CIC messages which allow retailers to send feedback back to suppliers).
   In my point of view every serious PIM system has to support the full GDSN choreography. And this also means to have specific UI's for the corresponding user roles and being aware that there is a new type of user role which has also to be established in the customers organisation.
   
   
5. As they consider retail as one of their major markets, they also consider supplier data onboarding for retailers as one of their key tasks - but they do not consider GDSN to be one of their main means to do so
   As their customers are very much in the ecommerce space and they are dealing a lot with sales and marketing oriented product information this decisions seems to be very much linked to the above topic 2 and 3 and that this type of data is just not available in the GDSN.
   Although I think that onboarding of supplier data is always following the same principle. It is independant whether I need supplier logistics data or some feature information. Only the content differs.

What is my take away?

GDSN seems to be struggeling from my point of view with two challenges:

1. Market perception: The market does not perceive GDSN as a major, global and successful way to synchronize product information. And this despite the huge community behind GS1 Standards and GDSN.
   I think that is really a misperception mainly because of the huge GS1 community. I am not aware of any comparable standardization organisation which is so user driven and has such a huge supporting community. But here also the second challenge comes into the game.
   
2. GDSN adoption and perception by the implementing companies: Although there is such a huge supporting community the real success stories where the implementing companies really have achieved the promised savings are still rare. And this is not mainly because GDSN is the wrong approach but because companies either have not implemented it at all or have not implemented it properly as part of a MDM program.

In one of my next postings I will discuss some alternatives to GDSN and how a combined approach of GDSN with some alternatives might help user companies to achieve their goals and thereby also help GDSN to improve its market perception.