Crowley synchronizes with LANSA's GDSN Solution
Crowley Foods, headquartered in Binghamton, NY, is a leading East Coast dairy manufacturer and distributor. Crowley operates 20 sales divisions, 13 manufacturing facilities and distributes products under regional brand names in more than 24 states east of the Mississippi River. Crowley has implemented the GS1 central item registry for supply-side transactions using LANSA connected to the 1SYNC Data Pool.
Diane Muller, information systems manager at Crowley Foods, says, "The LANSA solution allows us to communicate accurate, synchronized item level information quickly and cost effectively with our trading partners. Because our retail partners use identical, updated standards-compliant data, we can go quicker to market with new products."
"We can go quicker to market with new products"
The Challenge
Crowley Foods GTIN Maintenance Screen
A.T. Kearney, a leading management consulting firm, estimates that due to supply chain information inefficiencies $40 billion, or 3.5 percent of total sales, are lost each year in the North American retail market. Specifically, A.T. Kearney's study showed that 30 percent of items in retail catalogs have data errors, which cost between $60 and $80 each and consume 25 minutes of manual cleansing. Other findings revealed that 60 percent of invoices generated errors and 43 percent of invoices resulted in deductions. Additionally, for new products it can take up to four weeks for complete and accurate item data to reach the retailer for entry into their procurement systems.
GS1 is dedicated to the design and implementation of global standards and solutions to improve the efficiency and visibility of supply and demand chains globally and across sectors. GS1's GSDN (Global Data Synchronization Network) is an automated, standards-based, global environment that enables secure and continuous data synchronization, allowing trading partners to have consistent item data in their systems at the same time.
Suppliers load Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) information that can include a large number of attributes, such as descriptors, categorization, weight, and dimensions for each product into the Global Registry. 1SYNC, a GDSN certified data pool, checks the data for compliance to industry standards and synchronizes it with the retailers who are subscribed to the supplier's items, ensuring that all trading partners are using identical, updated, standards-compliant data.
Suppliers who want to do business with the major retailers will have to implement Global Data Synchronization (GDS) and will face the challenge of integrating product and other item definitions in their ERP packages and in-house written systems with their Trading Partners via GDSN.
"LANSA gives us control of the solution"
The Solution
Muller explains, "Our product categories include fluid milk, cultured dairy, frozen desserts, specialty dairy and non-dairy beverages. We manufacture these products under more than a dozen regional brand names and provide private label manufacturing for a number of different leading corporate brands. We have over 5,000 product items items which equates to roughly 15,000 GTIN's"
"As Internet based eCommerce became more of a common way of doing business, we found the underlying problem to be a lack of a single 'point of truth' for product information. As the supplier, we had what we felt was correct Item information that may or may not have matched up with our retail customer's procurement systems. Without a core foundation of agreed upon product information, higher level eCommerce processes really can't be effective."
"Just about every retailer had their own version of a manual form that had to filled in and sent by fax or mail for new products and changes. GS1's Global Registry makes these propriety forms redundant, saving us considerable time."
"We saw that the GDS was going to help improve the efficiency within of the food industry by developing eCommerce standards," says Muller. "The biggest challenge was deciding how we wanted to proceed with synchronizing our data. It takes only a day to register, but you need to integrate your enterprise item data."
"Suppliers can re-key product information on their Data Pool’s web site, hire a third-party vendor to publish it on their behalf, or directly integrate their database. The 1SYNC Solution partners that I spoke to offered me many disparate methods. Weeding through all those technologies and methodologies was mind boggling, and the costs for those were hard to justify."
"We evaluated several solutions and chose LANSA. With LANSA, there is no requirement for any other servers, B2B outsourcing services, or encryption/transport software. We own the software and can transmit to 1SYNC or any other GDSN certified data pool, without any per transaction costs associated with third-party services."
"LANSA uses the item information right off our production database, validates the data for GS1 compliancy and sends transactions in XML format in real-time directly from our iSeries to 1SYNC. Security is important to us and LANSA integrates with the GDSN secure AS2-compliant transport. XML response messages from 1SYNC are parsed and updated to our audit database. This gives us full non-repudiation that the transaction was successfully accepted by the Global Registry."
"The solution includes easy browser-based administration to maintain item attributes and launch publication, change, correction, withdraw and de-list transactions. It allows us to stage transactions for future processing and gives full life cycle maintenance by using LANSA's built-in workflow capabilities."
"LANSA hides complexity and leverages our existing iSeries skills and architecture"
The Benefits
"Now, we publish our updated item information only once and it is available in near real-time to all our trading partners who are subscribed to the GDSN. Our trading partners receive notification of the updates and can parse and update the GTIN information to their procurement systems."
"LANSA allows us to communicate accurate, synchronized item level information quickly and cost effectively with our trading partners. Our retail partners now use identical, updated and standards-compliant product data within the day that it becomes available."
"From an IT point of view, the solution is very smooth. We don't have any synchronization issues, because there is no data replication. We didn't have to modify or recompile any of the programs of our core ERP system, because we didn't have to expand our item master file. The LANSA solution is mapped to our production item master file and links to their GTIN extension file."
"LANSA Services took only 30 man-days to implement the solution. However, it is important for other companies to understand that there is a sizeable investment of time prior to LANSA's tactical install. Education is key and Crowley, as a company, had to get knowledgeable in the business issues of implementing a GSDN solution, such as setting up GTIN's and GLN's with respect to Private Label products. Gathering, verifying and entering the additional item information required by the Global Registry into LANSA's solution takes diligence as well as time."
"GDS is an investment touching many internal business processes and it's more than just sending an XML transaction from one computer to another. The LANSA solution was the most cost effective feature-to-feature when compared with the other Solution partners that I spoke with. And LANSA also assisted us in getting GS1 certified."
"We have the same data in our back-office systems as the retailers have in theirs"
Conclusion
Muller concludes, "My team has extensive knowledge of our ERP system, but was unfamiliar with XML and Internet-based transactions. Also, it was difficult to make time to study the implementation of GDSN standards. LANSA hides all the complexity and allows us to leverage our existing iSeries skills and architecture. LANSA gives us control of the solution."
"We now have the same data in our back-office systems as the retailers have in theirs. But, implementing GDS is only a first step in our plan to move to collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment strategy or CPFR. The ultimate goal is complete integration of the logistic processes of our internal systems with the external systems of our customers. LANSA has proven to work well in this first step on the road to enterprise application integration."
Company and System Information
- Crowley Foods, a division of Dallas-based National Dairy, manufactures and distributes quality dairy, refrigerated and frozen foods to both retail and foodservice channels in more than 24 states east of the Mississippi River in the USA. Crowley has 1600 staff, operates 20 sales divisions and 13 manufacturing facilities.
- Crowley's ERP system is an in-house application developed in Synon and COBOL. Crowley uses an iSeries model 820 to run their enterprise with access from 20 locations via a corporate WAN.
- For more information visit: www.crowleyfoods.com
- A.T. Kearny Inc. is a leading American management-consulting firm with a global presence of 60 offices in 35 countries. For more information visit: www.atkearney.com
- LANSA Data Sync Direct is a turnkey, scalable business solution used by more than 300 businesses to comply with retailer requests for data synchronization. The solution may be implemented in a hosted or behind-the-firewall configuration on Windows, IBM iSeries or i5 Systems and Linux. LANSA Data Sync Direct is certified by 1SYNC™ and also conforms to the latest EAN.UCC XML schema version.
- Find out more about LANSA's GDSN Solution