This Week in IDEA | November 29, 2006
This Week in IDEA is a bi-monthly eNewsletter created to keep the supply network informed about new IDEA happenings and other helpful resources regarding eBusiness trends and industry news. Become an eBiz expert and subscribe today!
Contents
- New IRD/CERICOMX® Customers
- Net Price into Stock: Van Meter Industrial and Lutron Electronics
- December IDW2 Training Calendar
- Seeking volunteers to complete UNSPSC Committees
- Data Warehouse Model to Be Used for Health Care
Subscribe to This Week in IDEA
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:
- Starport Foods
- Transolid, Inc.
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.
Net Price into Stock: Van Meter Industrial and Lutron Electronics
Whether you call it Net Price into Stock or Net Cost Into Stock, everyone has an opinion on this topic. More so, everyone has an opinion on this topic in relation to the IDW2. Distributors want it, some manufacturers understand that, but there are many who are not doing it; and there are many distributors who are suffering.
Let’s take a look at how two trading partners made Net Price into Stock via the IDW2 not only work, but work quite well for both the manufacturer and the distributor.
The Manufacturer:
Lutron Electronics
HQ: Coopersburg, PA
Offices in: the United Kingdom, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Spain and Brazil
Lutron offers products to satisfy virtually any residential or commercial project.
www.lutron.com
The Distributor:
Van Meter Industrial
HQ: Cedar Rapids, Iowa
15 locations throughout Iowa
More than 300 employee owners
www.vanmeterindustrial.com
Doing business as a distributor without Net Price into Stock information makes operating the business virtually impossible. And doing business with Net Price into Stock without the IDW2 is highly dependent upon getting each manufacturer trading partner to send the distributor the information they need in a timely manner and uniform format. Unfortunately it does not happen that way, adding unnecessary disorder and confusion to the fundamental intention of the IDW2 – to serve as a one stop shop for all manufacturers and distributors to respectively supply and pull all business information – this includes Net Pricing from the manufacturer.
“Without IDW2 I lose all current changes and future information --- which I don’t want to do. Suppliers need to understand that distributors want their data from one source not multiple sources,” said Joe Wallace, Administration Manager, Van Meter Industrial. “Receiving into stock net pricing via IDW2 is a huge efficiency gain. Multiple sources require duplicate imports and duplicate data management.”
Recently, Lutron Electronics made the initiative to set up their trading partner, Van Meter Industrial, with Net Price into Stock via the IDW2.
“We have been participating in the Electro E-Biz Forum for the past four years now. I find great value in attending this event. Meeting with distributors and other manufacturers helps me better understand their needs and the overall needs of the electrical industry. This year, during the Forum and the IDW2 Users Group meeting, it was very clear the number one request of the distributors was Net Price into Stock,” said Leo Gould, Information Systems Manager, Lutron Electronics.
During a session discussing Net Price into Stock, Van Meter, one of Lutron’s distributors made a request to the suppliers in attendance, to provide this information through the IDW2. Van Meter and others provided a good understanding of the benefits for the distributors. “Since this was the number one request of the distributors and Lutron’s number one principle is to ‘Take Care of the Customer’, I knew right away my job was to go back to work and reprioritize,” said Gould. “Van Meter was gracious enough to be the first distributor to do this with us.”
Distributors have ranked Net into Stock pricing as the most important IDW2 feature. It allows manufacturers to control authorizations and deliver private prices to a single location. The IDW2 also passed some very tough external and internal system security audits to provide IDW2 participants the safest and most secure method to send and receive pricing and product information.
“It was great to hear about the security rating that the IDW2 received; but this did not play a role in making the decision to provide this information. Lutron was already confident in the security provided in the IDW2 prior to that rating. The ‘excellent’ ratings just support our original belief in the system,” said Gould.
The Net Price into Stock feature can help:
• Reduce invoice and PO discrepancies for distributors.
• Eliminate labor costs of maintaining thousands of special pricing agreements.
• Give instantaneous pricing updates.
Originally, Lutron had been providing their product and pricing information to customers via CDs and more recently directing them to the company website over a secure connection. “But these processes are not as automated as using the IDW2,” said Gould. “I knew we needed something that would be a more integrated solution for Lutron and its customers.”
“I look forward to the day when my IDW2 pricing, including cost, is 100% synched to the supplier’s data. Then with confidence I can tell my Purchasing Department and Accounts Payable department that the price you see in IDW2 is the price you should see on the purchase order we cut to the supplier,” said Wallace.
Half of Van Meter’s updates are done via disk because they thrive on Net into Stock Pricing. This requires intervention from an employee to translate the data on each disk before he/she can even bring it into their business system. The IDW2 already contains an extraction and import process to automatically translate this data if the manufacturer supplies it directly to the IDW2.
“If net into stock pricing could come via IDW2 I would see half my translation time go away! That would allow more time to be proactive instead of reactive,” said Wallace.
The Process
“With Lutron it was easy. I did not have to do anything but extract the data once it was put in to make sure it matched the disk data which I already had in-house,” said Wallace. Lutron’s input of this information saved Van Meter on labor, brought efficiency gains to the company, allowed for quicker system updates and mostly, provided them with all the features to use IDW2.
Van Meter is currently working with additional suppliers to set their company up with Net Pricing via the IDW2. Wallace is adamant about having this information from all his suppliers and there are hundreds of employees like him who are willing to work with their suppliers to make this a priority. “I would tell any manufacturer who is not currently providing their Net Pricing to the IDW2, ‘What are your road blocks and can I do anything to help remove them?’” said Wallace.
Gould stated, “When suppliers provide their information electronically to the IDW2, it is always a great step towards data synchronization. Not only can the distributor get accurate information, but it just makes good business sense to have a central repository to access all your product and pricing information.”
December IDW2 Training Calendar
In addition to the ongoing distributor trainings and all-users’ Q&A sessions, IDEA also offers manufacturer trainings.
The December 2006 IDW2 Training Schedule is:
IDW2 Distributor Training sessions:
Wednesday, December 13 – 1:30–3:00PM EST
Wednesday, December 27 – 1:30-3:00PM EST
General Net-Pricing Sessions (open to all):
Thursday, December 28 – 1:30-2:00PM EST
All-user Ask the IDW2 Experts Q&A sessions:
Wednesday, December 6 - 1:30–3:30PM EST
Wednesday, December 20 – 1:30-3:30PM EST
IDW2 Manufacturer Training sessions:
Thursday, December 7 – 1:30–3:30PM EST
Thursday, December 21 – 1:30-3:30PM EST
If you plan on attending an Ask the IDW2 experts session, it is recommended, but not mandatory, to e-mail questions in advance, as those questions will be addressed first. These sessions will aim to help you:
o Resolve your IDW2 issues
o Learn from those in your industry
o Find out how your supplier or distributor is using the IDW2
Additional training sessions are announced each month in This Week in IDEA.
To sign up for a training session, please contact Silvio Rodriguez, Customer Service Manager, at 703-562-4620.
Seeking volunteers to complete UNSPSC Committees
IDEA will be resuming the bi-weekly UNSPSC meetings this December. There are 10 UNSPSC product team committees that IDEA would like fill with an even balance of distributors and manufacturers. The meetings will be held via webinar, requiring no travel.
If you are interested in participating please go to the Zoomerang.com survey to sign up. For further information, please contact David Frenkel at 703-562-4610.
Data Warehouse Model to Be Used for Health Care
Next week Intel, Wal-Mart, BP and others will reveal a plan to provide digital health records to their employees and to store them in a multimillion dollar data warehouse that will link hospitals, doctors and pharmacies. The goal is to cut health care costs by having the employees/consumers coordinate their own health care among doctors and hospitals.
Next week the companies will also announce their collaboration on a health record standard and 10 companies will contribute about $1.5M each to construct a data warehouse to store and update the health e-records.
Once in place the data warehouse will allow consumers and insurers to evaluate price and performance data from millions of employees. Eliminating duplicate tests and erroneous information would also cut administrative overhead which is estimated to account for 40% of medical costs. Electronic prescriptions alone could help prevent nearly 100,000 serious illnesses or deaths annually from prescription mistakes. Doctors could use the records to benchmark which worked best for seriously ill patients. Patient medical records often handwritten would transition to readable and understandable files.
But the idea of portable medical records and a massive repository still faces hurdles. Privacy advocates worry that the records will be misused and one patient advocacy group urges employers to shun the idea until adequate protections are in place.
The 10 company collation expects to apply market pressure and incentives to get Doctors and hospitals on board. Wal-Mart will apply its purchasing power to get bar codes on products intended for hospitals and clinics.
The health record data in the repository will be the property of the employees and the data will be mined by insurers and others after the identity is stripped off and authorization access is set up.
Each of the 10 companies share a common enemy: benefit costs. Intel estimates that its health care spending will be as much as 1/5 of its R&D costs by 2009. Wal-Mart says the costs for its U.S. employees if unchecked will climb $1B annually for the next 5 years. While healthcare in the U.S. has remained paper based and fragmented we only need to look at Denmark where hospitals, pharmacies and doctors communicate via a secure network and where Danes can go online to book appointments, renew prescriptions, view records and query their doctors.
With health care costs being one of the biggest concerns in the electrical industry maybe this model merits some consideration? We already have the data warehouse infrastructure built! Now if we can only get through the concern about using IDW2 for delivering Net Price into Stock.
