New MyGS1 features reduce product set up time for suppliers to Mitre 10
Product data sharing with hardware and building sector retailers is getting much easier and faster, thanks to the new MyGS1 platform from GS1 New Zealand.
Product manufacturers and suppliers are progressively adopting Shared Products within MyGS1 to upload product item and price information to Mitre 10’s master data and category management systems, and to its web-based marketplace.
From Mitre 10’s perspective, Master Data Article Manager Kevin MacDonald-Goodwin says: “In today’s retail market with increasing competition and relentless drive for efficiency in everything we do, having consistent, high-quality data has never been more important. We just don’t have time to be checking and rechecking data, filling in gaps and so on…if you have real confidence in the data, this allows you to get on with searching for better functionality in your systems and processes, and building value for customers and for our business.”
Shared Products, accessed through the MyGS1 portal, gives manufacturers and suppliers a radically improved user interface between the National Product Catalogue (NPC) – where product data is generally held – and the retailers’ systems.
It's the GS1 NZ response to issues that many hardware and building products companies were reporting with time consuming manual processes for product data sharing.
Now, manufacturers and suppliers can easily set up all the item information – GTIN, detailed product descriptions and attributes, marketing messages and pricing that retailers need for enriching their online presence. The Shared Products page displays the upload status for each set of product data and retailer responses, along with functionality to deactivate any previous uploads or make changes.
Through February and March, GS1 NZ has been supporting more than 160 suppliers to Mitre 10 with their migration to upload marketing messages and features and benefits to Shared Products. This is allowing suppliers to easily update and edit the supporting information for their products. Feedback so far has been very positive. Indeed, there’s fast growing recognition that ease and speed in data sharing is a major contributor to the data quality which is so critical across the Hardware and Building Products sector.
With Mitre 10 now in transition to a major new SAP-based digital platform, Kevin MacDonald-Goodwin says Shared Products and working with GS1 NZ are all about leveraging the group’s new capabilities for automation and process simplification.
“One of the benefits will be speeding up the time it takes suppliers to provide us with all the rich product data we need…they populate the right fields as set up by GS1 and within minutes that data is at our doorstep. Then it takes only 2 or 3 days for the product to be on our website, not the weeks that it used to take.”