Home Improvement: A Sector Builds Collaboration

While the leaders of the grocery and consumer-product sectors have been working on collaboration standards such as UCCnet for several years, the home-improvement sector has been mostly on the sidelines. But it's planning to catch up fast.

Consider Lowe's Home Improvement. The company told its suppliers last December that they needed to start planning to improve electronic data sharing. Recently, Lowe's told suppliers they should have their products in the UCCnet registry and be prepared to do XML-based online data synchronization by Jan. 1. That's a long way from how Lowe's enters product information from manufacturers today. "We take spreadsheets and key in the data," says Matt Deeter, VP of merchandising operations.

A Lowe's supplier changing product information pulls a spreadsheet template from Lowe's Web site, enters dozens of product specifications, and E-mails it to Lowe's staff. They print it out and key that data in. The process works, but it comes with the errors and the inefficiency of manual data entry. Once its suppliers are on UCCnet, Lowe's and each supplier can tap that registry to make sure their data is synchronized when it comes to product specifications.

It's part of an effort by companies throughout the industry--including retailers such as Ace Hardware, Home Depot, and Lowe's, and manufacturers such as Black & Decker, Georgia-Pacific, and 3M--to push for industrywide adoption of data-synchronization standards. Ace Hardware, for instance, was one of the first hardware and home-improvement companies to endorse UCCnet, and it will start testing the UCCnet Global Registry with several of its suppliers in the coming weeks.

While the UCCnet registry works with today's bar-code-based systems, that same data will be the foundation for next-generation radio-frequency ID technology and the numeric code associated with it, called electronic product code, says Arthur Smith, president of the Electronic Commerce Council of Canada, who joined Deeter on a panel at the Retail Systems show last week to discuss data-synchronization strategies. Electronic product code "demands a data-synchronization plan to go forward," he said. "So there's nothing we're doing today that won't be valuable" with RFID technologies.

Embracing UCCnet doesn't mean a massive rewrite of Lowe's technology backbone. The company will continue using EDI for invoicing and payment interaction that it does electronically with suppliers today, Deeter says. He adds, "We're not planning on changing any of our EDI systems to an XML environment."

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Illustration by Craig LaRotonda