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It is often said that retail is detail, but what is neglected from that maxim is that the detail has to be accurate to have any value.
This often means that your detail has to be the same as your supplier's detail, whether it's about promotions, new products or invoicing information.
That, in a nutshell, is why data synchronization between food distributors and their suppliers have taken on such great importance in recent years. Companies like Supervalu, Wegmans and Wal-Mart Stores have led the industrywide push toward trading partners synchronizing their data based on standardized processes.
Yet accuracy is not always enough in the fast-paced food retailing environment. To react to changing competitive scenarios, real-time access to information is also critical for both retailers and their suppliers. Wal-Mart has revolutionized this concept with its Retail Link Web portal that gives its suppliers real-time data on their store movement.
In pure food retailing, Supervalu may be the only company that can rival Wal-Mart for both data sync and portals. As one of the leading pioneers in this space, Supervalu is now taking these applications one step further as it links its internally developed Web-based portal, dubbed SVHarbor, to its world-class data synchronization engine.
Introduced three years ago as an electronic conduit to its independent and corporate retail stores, SVHarbor was opened up to Supervalu's suppliers about a year ago. Retailers and manufacturers use the portal for communicating with Supervalu and accessing a wide range of information. "We're very pleased with the response to the portal from both sides," said Bernie Grutsch, director of buying systems. "It improves collaboration with vendors."
Collaboration was a theme often cited last week by Jeff Noddle, Supervalu's chief executive officer, who spoke about SVHarbor and many other issues at Food Marketing Institute's 2005 Distribution Conference in San Francisco. (See story, Page 24.)
In one of the most important new applications for SVHarbor, Supervalu began testing the portal this month as a vehicle for suppliers to send new-item information. This information automatically becomes integrated into Supervalu's data synchronization process so that the data's key attributes are synchronized through Supervalu's data pool, UCCnet, Lawrenceville, N.J., with those of the source...