Proprietary Vs Global Standards

Supply chain/logistics accounts for 8-10% of operating costs and upto 20% of product costs globally. With increasing interlinkages between businesses, multiple vendors, and a globalised marketplace, supply chains are no longer standalone entities but involve a complex network of product and information flow among various trade partners across sectors and nations.

Adopting a common universal language of business understood by all supply chain partners globally is one key to efficiency.

Global standards obviate the need for translators at every point of the supply chain so that there is a seamless and speedier flow of data and products. This makes supply chains more responsive, more flexible, more efficient and more dynamic. In turn, this leads to lower downtime, lower costs and increased profitability for companies.

Drawbacks of proprietary coding

Proprietary supply chains do not compliment each other as they use different standards. Each time there is a transaction between two proprietary supply chain networks, data needs to be re-entered and mapped, resulting in slowdowns and inaccuracy along the supply chain, apart from incurring high costs. With inventory management systems like Just In time (JIT) being adopted by companies increasingly, standardisation in supply chain is assuming more significance.

Over one million companies across the world use GS1 standards which were developed by GS1 collaboratively with the Industry, 30 years ago. Over 5 billion barcodes are scanned each day at retail point of sale outlets worldwide making GS1 standards, the de-facto standards in retail.

Standardisation in supply chain facilitates:

-          Unambiguous identification of physical goods, consignments, locations, 

        legal/ functional entities, assets etc.

-          Efficient system integration and seamless dataflow between front-end 

        (Point-Of-Sale) Retail & back-end (warehouse) operations and with trading  

        partners.

-          Facilitates product track & trace across the supply chain.

-          Unambiguous linkage between physical products and related information 

        flows.

-          Eliminate inefficiencies due to mismatches in ordering, invoicing, dispatches.

-          Efficient product category introduction and management.

-          Lower administrative costs through elimination of errors.

-          Facilitates compliance with International best practices and thereby 

        acceptance by International buyers.