GSMP Weekly Update 19-08-11:

If you have an opinion or would like us to provide feedback on your behalf, please feel free to contact me. srobba@sa2worldsync.com

Trade Item Implementation Guide
We has 2 successes this week. The Healthcare Implementation Guide was approved and will be in the next release of the Trade Item Implementation Guide. Also, motioned to public review is a project that has been worked on for over 2 years, TIIG for Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A). I recommend you take a look at the guide as it should show how to do GDS properly based upon the scenario of the Merger/Acquisition you company may be involved with. This is a very important piece of work as it will be helpful to you in many ways giving you information on Global Company Prefixes and questions your organization might have during a M&A. Click here for Document.

GDSN
Much discussion has been taking place on the Display Unit Indicator change process. We have found inconsistent usage of the "CORRECT" and "CHANGE_BY_REFRESH" by trading partners and data pools. This issue has now caused trading partners to review all change or corrects as changes. Some trading partners only send CORRECT, therefore retailers can only process them all as a change. The Trade Item Implementation Group will look to give some guidance on how best to use these codes from a process perspective.
CORRECT - A correction allows a Data Source to make changes to Catalogue Item data that would not be allowed by validation rules and as such is outside of normal processing. It is intended to provide a means for errors to be corrected and not as an alternative to the Change Registered Catalogue Item process.
CHANGE_BY_REFRESH - A change that has occurred to the trade item in which the data needs to be communicated. This should not be used when the trade item has not changed and you are correcting information. In addition, this should not be used to circumvent the GTIN validation rules.

Maintenance Release 5 Business Message Standard 2.8
We reviewed the public comments and GS1 has presented us the revisions. We approved those revisions and now the XML schema's are being developed. We are hoping to motion to eBallot the standard before the end of the month. Hopefully we will have a definite date to expect the implementation.

GPC
Beer? Juice? The sub-groups of Global Product Classifications made great progress this week in determining the Classification attributes for Beer. We determined that less attributes made more sense as Style of Beer was looked at many different ways within markets, some by colour, ingredient, process, etc. We also made some recommendations on Fruit Juice and Vegetable Juice and how do you classify blends. Blends we determined should be based upon the characteristic of the blend. For example a juice may be sold as Pomegranate but may contain 50% or more vegetable juice. We stated this should be Fruit as it is being sold as a fruit juice and should be classified as such.

Events
September 26th-30th -- GS1 Industry and Standards Autumn Event –Cologne, Germany
October 4th-6th - GS1 Healthcare Conference Autumn 2011 – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Feel free to contact me if you would like to discuss,
Steve  srobba@sa2worldsync