Transforming GS1 NZ’s digital products to deliver better experiences for members

GS1 New Zealand’s digital product roadmap

Our digital team is working hard to create seamless experiences for our members. We’ve laid out a detailed digital product roadmap, strongly supported by the GS1 Board, that aligns with member needs and will guide us through the next few years. Here’s a glimpse of what we’ve achieved so far in 2024:

• Streamlining the way data is sent to Woolworths New Zealand with the National Product Catalogue: The new process sends product image data, and On Pack data (such as ingredients, nutritional, and allergen information), to Woolworths New Zealand through the National Product Catalogue. This data can now be integrated into the product master data that is currently in the National Product Catalogue.
• New ProductRecallNZ feature: We’ve introduced a contact directory feature to ProductRecallNZ, providing essential head office contact details for major retailers, regulators, and GS1 support teams. This directory is updated by GS1 regularly to ensure accuracy, helping users efficiently manage communications during the recall process.
• ‘Behind-the-scenes’ upgrades: The digital team has a major application modernisation programme in place as well as other work streams around improving availability and resilience. The application modernisation programme’s purpose is to shift to cloud hosting for our digital products to improve the resilience, security and availability of systems. This programme will deliver a more robust software architecture meaning fewer outages, scalability and services that are less prone to issues.

In 2024, we’ve made significant progress in enhancing our digital products and services to better serve our members. To ensure we continue to provide reliable, secure products and a seamless experience, we have taken the step to grow and upskill our digital team over the last year. This allows us to respond to growing use of our digital products and ensure we can meet our members' needs now, and into the future.

Introducing Paul Matthews, Chief Information Officer

To lead this digital transformation, we’re thrilled to welcome Paul Matthews as our Chief Information Officer. With over 25 years of experience in the tech sector, Paul brings a wealth of knowledge in transformational change and skills development.

Before joining GS1, Paul was the Chief Executive of IT Professionals NZ and CIO Studio, where he guided digital transformation for various industries across New Zealand. His extensive leadership experience, including board roles in tech and education, makes him the perfect fit to steer our digital team towards the future.

The growth of the digital team means that not only can we carry out a robust plan of work, we can also respond to technological advancements such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), and data warehousing.

We’ve set up an AI lab to explore how we can further use this technology to make life easier for our members. There is a heap of internal and external use cases being evaluated - watch this space! We expect to be rolling out some great functionality over the next few months.

Data warehousing offers huge potential for providing our members with valuable insights into trends and market conditions. By bringing together data we collect on products and locations, we can provide members the kind of market intelligence that can help you plan product launches and improvements with confidence.