DIAMOND BAR, CA – After instituting a pilot program among its manufacturer members and their warehouse distributor trading partners, SEMA’s Business Technology Committee (BTC) announced that it has completed the first of three phases in its SEMA Data Pool Pilot Program.
SEMA said findings from Phase I demonstrate that standardized and synchronized product and application information immediately lowers costs of doing business, increases customer satisfaction and has the potential to substantially increase sales.
A white paper summarizing Phase I of the SEMA Data Pool Pilot Program has been published at www.sema.org/btc.
“These initial findings confirm our original beliefs that greater operational efficiencies and increased sales can result for both manufacturers and distributors when the data they both use is in an industry standardized format,” said Alan Dicker, SEMA’s director of business technology. “It’s clear now that if more SEMA members have their data in standard formats, it will create additional opportunities to sell products to and through more outlets.”
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 overall goal of the program is to facilitate the validation and synchronization of the data files used by small, medium and large manufacturers and distributors, creating an industry data pool. Studies in other aftermarket segments had shown that incomplete, non-standardized and unsynchronized data resulted in a loss of 1.7 percent of sales.
Phase I acquired product-data requirements from a small number of warehouse distributors (aka receivers) via a survey and assisted a group of parts suppliers (aka manufacturers) to gather, cleanse and format their product information in a standardized format. Upon completion of that step, product data between the two was compared and synchronized utilizing the services of a broad group of aftermarket data-service companies.
Among the findings of the study:
* Data requirements were acquired and compared from four of the top warehouse distributors in the industry and a set of required product data fields was developed;
* The product information of six of the manufacturers was validated to the accepted industry standard;
* Three of the six manufacturers validated their application data;
* Five instances of complete product information synchronization between suppliers and distributors were accomplished; and
*A number of necessary changes to the standards have been identified and suggested to the standard’s body.
For more information about SEMA, go to: http://www.sema.org.
