South Africa`s FMCG community is soon to become party to a global commerce internet protocol which will see 850 000 companies joined into a single e-commerce community. Retailers, suppliers and manufacturers in South Africa`s FMCG industry have taken a major step into the electronic commerce community with the implementation of a national product catalogue. Initiated by the South African chapter of the EAN - the international numbering standards body - the product catalogue is regarded as the foundation for the FMCG industry to come into line with the Global Commerce Initiative (GCI), a voluntary joint effort among consumer products retailers, manufacturers and international standards bodies.
Commerce Centre, the e-commerce community service provider in the Datacentrix group, expects 6000 South African FMCG manufacturers, distributors and retailers to be live on the e-commerce network by February 2002. Commerce Centre hosts the network, and represents the African node of a 16-node international network of e-commerce community service providers.
The Global Commerce Internet Protocol establishes the first comprehensive recommendations on the management of standardised data across the world`s FMCG trading exchanges and other business-to-business communications via the Internet. This is the first set of global standards for Internet trading under the GCI.
"In recommending preliminary global data and communications standards, this move eliminates one of the biggest obstacles to effective Internet trading," says Stewart Barker, CEO of Commerce Centre. "Now, with this recommendation on data languages, the Internet can begin to realise its extraordinary potential as a commercial tool."
Dr. Mario A. Corti, acting co-chairman of the Initiative and Executive Vice President of Nestl'e S.A says. "These basic standards benefit everyone: without them, it would be as though the world was full of telephones unable to talk to each other."
Malcolm Leitch, director, customer development, at Lever Pond`s (Pty) Ltd says, "for suppliers the product catalogue is a non-threatening, low-risk e-commerce first-step for our industry. E-commerce can`t exist if there are no common standards, and no clean data is available to work off. The product catalogue is foundational to further e-commerce community initiatives in the FMCG industry."
The facility allows producers to place the full details of their product ranges in a central database. Typical information includes product description, weight and dimensions, standard packaging, promotions, lead times, bar codes and many more. The retailers can browse and subscribe to this information electronically. The information thus obtained will be used to initiate either internal or external processes.
"The National product catalogue guarantees business interoperablity, which extends globally," says EAN SA Chairman Ronnie Herzfeld. "The catalogue does away with a barrier to our FMCG manufacturers` entering international markets."
Commerce Centre, who hosts the national product catalogue, specialises in creating, powering and managing secure e-marketplace communities where multiple buyers and sellers can conduct real-time transactions, exchange goods and services, collaborate on business opportunities and share information faster and at lower costs. Its software and services allow customers to build e-communities, to integrate business processes and to exchange information within and between enterprises worldwide.
In recent months, Exchanges and other business-to-business communications have evolved rapidly around the world, and companies often find themselves interacting not just with each other but with a number of different Exchanges or Internet vehicles. Concerned that non-standardised data conventions can only cause costly, unnecessary confusion between users and increase the probability of processing errors, the member companies and eight associations represented on the Executive Board of the Global Commerce Initiative have agreed to a letter of support for the development of the Global Commerce Internet Protocol. They have now been joined by the four major Exchanges presently active in the consumer goods industry: Transora, the WorldWide Retail Exchange, GlobalNetXchange, and CPGmarket.com.
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