Electrical Distributor Data Warehouse Standards

IDW Data Warehouse Structured Data Advances

by Greg Carter

NEMA, IDEA, NAED, ETM and GS1 (see Electrical Distribution Data Centers – Part II). are tackling the “normalization” of electrical distribution data shared among OEMs and the supply chain abroad. IDEA recently announced 1 million fully attributed SKU’s. The Industrial Data Warehouse is making a strong case for “non-sourced” data vs. Harvested OEM and Distributor data.

TED magazine published a “Platinum Band of Excellence Manufacturers”, recognizing IDEA, the storehouse of the Industry Data Warehouse, for taming fragmented product data and attributes. IDEA chairman, Steve Sokolow, says content in IDEA’s Industrial Data Warehouse (IDW) has “tripled”. Manufacturers provide detailed content to support distributor e-commerce. Scientifically defining, naming and categorizing millions of industrial products is referred to as industrial and electrical taxonomy.

More than just letters and numbers identifying a part, product data joins SKUs to, spec sheets, images and product attributes. Effective e-commerce strategies cleanse the data for logically displaying products on the web, making it easier for search engines to index the products and return products in search engine results.

Small business can move faster, uniting Marketing, IT and Sales to develop strategies for using Commodity Codes, UPC Codes and NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturer Codes (NEMA) for importing the information into Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and CRMs. Departmental communication occurs when sales teams grab pricing and data to prepared quotes. including product descriptions, pricing discounts and product images. Marketing uses the rich information to support products with printed media for online and offline.

Related Article: Electrical Data Centers Part II

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