This Week in IDEA | April 11, 2007

New IDEA Customer: Meletio Lighting and Electrical

Meletio, a lighting and electrical distributor from Dallas, TX, became an IDEA customer on April 5, 2007. Meletio is proud to service and supply custom homebuilders, well known commercial clients, lighting designers and architects, electrical contractors and individual consumers. They will be taking advantage of the cost saving features and reliability of the Industry Data Exchange (IDX2), and they will be using the Industry Data Warehouse (IDW2) to obtain their suppliers' product and pricing information. Meletio is a proud member of IMARK. Visit the Meletio Website for more information. Welcome aboard!

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New IRD/CERICOMX® Customers

IDEA, a 1SYNC Data Pool On-Board Solution (OBS) partner, implements suppliers that subscribe to the 1SYNC data pool using IDEA's IRD CERICOMX application. IDEA was recently assigned the following suppliers:

- DekoRRa Products LLC
- Centoco Manufacturing Corp.
- Crown Technology, Inc.
- The Lincoln Electric Company
- Pacific Clay Products
- Neat-Oh! International, LLC
- Mann’s Bait Company
- Home Dynamix LLC
- PlanAhead, LLC
- Overland Travelware, LLC

These companies will be trained to use IRD CERICOMX®, an IDEA branded product for supporting and uploading supplier product information into the GS1 Registry® and GDSN via the 1SYNC Data Pool.

If you would like to learn more about the CERICOMX® product, please contact John Etrie, IDEA IRD Product Manager, here or at (703) 562-4624; or Tony Gaffney, IDEA CERICOMX® Implementation Manager, here or at (508) 386-0261.

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Platt Electric Supply: Sponsor of Electro E-Biz Forum 2007

The Electro E-Biz Forum 2007 Committee would like to thank Platt Electric Supply for their Bronze Level sponsorship.

Platt ES is a value added service company that supplies a broad range of high quality products and services to the electrical construction, commercial, industrial, utility, digital surveillance, and datacomm markets. Today, Platt has over 900+ employees and a network of branches that service 6 western states from over 97 locations. Learn more about Platt ES here.

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Lily Saad Joins the IDEA Team

Lily Saad, formerly of Wachovia Bank, has joined the IDEA team as a Business Development Manager. Lily will work directly with senior management to develop and implement the annual business plan. Her primary responsibilities will include supporting decision making processes by researching prospective market opportunities and business partners; assessing and executing opportunities to adopt and sell IDEA products and services. Lily can be reached at (703) 562-4606 or via email here. Welcome to the IDEA team!

This position was newly created to expand IDEA’s solutions and services worldwide.

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Learn More about the IDW2 Authorization Process with IDEA's Interactive Training Modules

Interactive training modules for the IDW2 are now available! Both the distributor and manufacturer modules explain the importance of authorizations to the IDW2, the various authorization participants, the levels in the authorization hierarchy and how to navigate the company authorization screen.

The Manufacturer Authorization Training Module covers:

- How to authorize distributors at the company, class code, and price sheet levels
- How to cost enable distributors
- How to restrict distributors authorizations to individual class codes and price sheets
- How to create and control authorizations using class groups
- How to receive and respond to distributor authorization requests

The Distributor Authorization Training Module covers:

- How to accept manufacturer data at the company, class code, and price sheet levels
- How to limit acceptance of manufacturer data to individual class codes and price sheets
- How to request manufacturer authorizations

IDEA is dedicated to customer education and is in the process of creating more interactive training guides featuring other IDEA products and features. Only IDEA customers have access to these resources. Please contact Rita Hagopian at (703)562-4628 if you are interested in viewing these training modules. Continue to check This Week in IDEA for updates.

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Did You Know? IDW2 Hot Fact

You can use the “Job Manager” screen to keep track of the reports, data requests, and data loads you’ve run on the IDW2. When you first click on the link, any jobs that are currently running will be displayed. You also have the option of searching for jobs that have either been accepted or rejected by changing your search using the “Job Status” drop-down menu. To determine why a job failed, run a search for any jobs with Job Status of “Error”, and drill down into the job number to see the details. Click on the “Log” tab to be taken to a screen which will display any errors that occurred – this will be an important first step in the troubleshooting process.

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IDW2 Facts and Figures

DAC – The Data Audit and Certification (DAC) program is an annual fee-based service that originated in 2003. The DAC program consists of several components:

• Staff previewing manufacturer’s data for completeness
• Processing the manufacturer’s data via the IDW2 data validation function
• Managing and educating suppliers about the DAC rules and requirements
• Ensuring requirements for data loaded prior to IDW2 implementation (2005) or customer requested requirements are met.
• Training and Support

The goal is to have 100% of the manufacturer-direct sourced data in the IDW2 certified for end users. DAC customers get hands-on support and training from IDEA as part of the fee.

While the IDW2 data validation is automated and the data is checked each time the data is loaded - only DAC participants get the hands on support to assist them with addressing load summary error reports. Load Summary reports are sent to manufacturers as well as their authorized distributors with status of the data.

Enriched/Catalog Data – the IDW2 has the capability to accept manufacturer enriched data and product images either as stored data or via a URL link.

Net Price/Cost into Stock - The IDW2 can deliver Net Price/Cost into Stock data to a specific distributor location. Several manufacturers are using that function today.

Security – Two security audits were completed on the IDW2 by Digital Defense, Inc. The first included both an External-Penetrations test as well as a Social Engineering test. The second audit assessed the ability for an authorized user to access unauthorized data within the system. The IDW2 passed both audits with Excellent ratings - the highest rating possible by Digital Defense, leaving no doubt that the IDW2 is the most secure way to deliver private pricing data.

Delivery Format - IDW2 data can be delivered in three formats - EDI 832, Flat File EZ View Pipe or Custom, which is a mapped format to the distributor's specific needs, be it their software ERP program or a format of their choice. The IDW2 scheduler enables the end user to set up an automatic delivery schedule based on day and time. Users can download immediately, one time or on a recurring basis. They can have the data pushed to them or they can pull the data on their own schedule.

Reliability - Since IDW2 became operational, other then scheduled maintenance time, it has had no outages or down time. The IDW2 machine has tremendous operational capability, capacity and reliability.

Key to Success - The key to a successful IDW2 is the manufacturer community participation through the delivery of complete and timely product and price files, enriched data and product images as well as the delivery of net prices into stock either through the IDW2 or via an EDI 845.

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