DIAMOND BAR, Calif. – SEMA’s Business Technology Committee (BTC) has completed the second phase of its data pilot program, which involves SEMA manufacturers and their warehouse distributor trading partners. The findings confirm that non-standardized and vital missing product data between suppliers and distributors results in lost sales opportunities, ordering delays, excess inventory and expensive order processing errors.

In Phase II of the three-part program, SEMA obtained data requirements from key industry warehouse distributors, mail order companies and retail data receivers. These companies identified their most important trading partners, who were then invited to participate in an expanded data cleansing, standardization and synchronization project. As a result, product data from all 19 participating suppliers was cleansed and synchronized with their receivers. In the end, SEMA was able to sync up five distributors with 19 of their validated product lines, for a total of 46 alignments.

 “These Phase II findings make it clear to these SEMA industry participants that even small gains in efficiency can translate into substantial savings and increased sales,” said Alan Dicker, SEMA’s director of business technology. “We are confident there will be substantially greater benefits for the entire marketplace once most supply chain participants begin trading standardized product information.”

The SEMA Data Pilot Program was created in August 2006 to jumpstart the process of sharing data between a group of SEMA manufacturers and their warehouse distributor trading partners by helping them gather their data to make it standards-compliant. The program’s overall goal is to create a standardized industry data pool by facilitating the validation and synchronization of the data files used by small, medium and large manufacturers and distributors. Studies in other aftermarket segments had shown that incomplete, non-standardized and unsynchronized data, resulted in excess costs of 1.7 percent of sales.

To learn more about the SEMA Business Technology Committee and to find a White Paper with all the details about the study, visit www.sema.org/btc.