Many companies are interested in Product Lifecycle Management solutions, which integrate data and processes associated with the procurement of materials, creation of products, and the subsequent aging and retirement of products.

One of the first steps in the implementation of a PLM application is the creation of a comprehensive list of all products that are produced by the company on an enterprise/global basis. For most companies, that have thousands of products that are sold on global basis, integrating the product information can be an onerous task.

We help our clients get a unified view of their enterprise Products by:

• Providing a catalog of enterprise Products, showing where the underlying data resides. E.g. identifying all the database tables where Product-related data can be found.
  
  
• Discovering and classifying all the Product IDs across the enterprise.
  E.g. identifying all the database tables where Product IDs data can be found.
  
  
• Creating a "golden" copy of Product data, listing all of the Products across the organization.
  
  
• Creating the Product cross reference table and identifying all of the relationships between Product IDs in the enterprise landscape.
  
  
• Synchronizing the entity cross reference table and ensuring that the "golden" repository is continuously synchronized with the enterprise data environment.

BARRIERS TO MULTI-COUNTRY PRODUCT DATA INTEGRATION

The general approach to Product data integration is to map the existing Product IDs to a standard (e.g. UPC). Unfortunately, this approach does not work with Product data that is outside the US, or outside the retail industry.

The alternative approach is to obtain this unified view by implementing SAP R3 or another PLM system to provide this integrated information. However, most ERP implementations integrate the product data and processes within a country. It is often too costly to do the data integration on a multi-country basis across all major Product and Manufacturing systems.

Another alternative is to create a multi-country data warehouses and often pull data from Product related applications. However, such projects are inherently risky, and are known to often fail, because of the complexity and cost associated with integrating data and metadata that distributed in a heterogeneous global data landscape.

OUR SOLUTION

An Enterprise Product Data Repository having

• A table with an accurate, up-to-date list of all Products on an enterprise-wide basis.
  
  
• The ability to determine all the new Products that have been added recently, on an enterprise-wide basis.
  
  
• A hierarchy of Products, showing the parent-child relationships.

By using a combination of software and services solutions, we automate significant portions of the Product data integration effort. As a result, we can deliver integrated Product data repositories to companies at a reasonable cost. We can mitigate the risk associated with such projects, by delivering turn-key solutions.

Click here to find out more about how Global IDs' technology can dramatically reduce time and effort required for global / enterprise data integration projects.