Project Clean Sweep

To ensure supply chain collaboration, Conair dives head first into item synchronization
Conair Corporation has been a traditional family-owned company since its inception more than 45 years ago. The manufacturer of personal products -- from hairdryers to food processors to telephones -- gets 30 percent to 40 percent of its business from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. After receiving a letter from Wal-Mart two and a half years ago exhorting its trading partners must do so, Conair decided it had to start looking into item synchronization.

Tried & True

As a result, Conair is now moving toward achieving full supply chain collaboration with its business partners. "Our company likes staying with things that are tried and true. There's two ruts out back where we were drug into this arena," jokes Scott Brown, customer compliance manager, Conair. "Since this was a customer compliance project rather than IT, it fell into my lap."

Brown looked at a half dozen products and vendors before selecting nuBridges' truExchange Item Sync.

"We were in the middle of implementing SAP, and needed easy integration with that. Many vendors said they could work with SAP, but SAP had never heard of them. How can you work with something, when that company has never heard of you? Our IT guy commented, 'Does everybody with a garage and a computer think they can come up with the software to do this?'"

According to Brown, nuBridges showed up with a handful of discs and published the first item by the end of the afternoon.

"We helped them build the SAP bridge, so now every night our material file drops into the truExchange Item Sync. It's scrubbed against the file it has there already, and any items that have any differences are posted on the workloads for change. All of the other items, if they're published, they're ignored; if they've never been published, they're put on a work list as brand new. We go in, do a quick review, flag them and off they go -- which is really nice because in our busy season we'll change or add 200 items a week, and have 30,000 to 40,000 items actively in our system at any given time, worldwide. We had a lot of people doing things manually before we implemented this," Brown explains. "We can move things en masse with nuBridges."

The product provides real-time data sync and notification, is data pool agnostic and helps navigate industry mandates.

Work in Progress

According to Brown, the innovative aspects are ease of use and the ability to scale the product. "Some companies have 5-10 GTINs [14-digit Global Trade Identification Numbers] in total, and we have 100,000, so scalability is key. We're planning to get five customers up and running in the first quarter, then the next three to four, and so on," he explains.

Benefits so far have included the elimination of a lot of cluttered data and getting corrected weights and measures for better pallets, more accurate shipping costs and less weight inspection charges.

"We get UPCs assigned correctly and labeled right," says Brown. "Orders are sent by that GTIN, so there is no confusion about what they mean. Our back-end systems are both in sync. We still have our own SKUs internally, so we have a simple name, not 14 digits to talk about. Overall, the faster you move product, the more you'll sell, and the more money you'll make," he explains.

The process will be ongoing for the next five years. "It took two months to get our collection process in order. For the data clean up, we cleaned what we needed, by customer, and many customers have similar items. The data stays clean by our new approach, as do new items coming in. Older items are soon obsolete, and so no longer need cleaning," Brown explains.

He says that the ROI is hard to measure in exact dollars and cents, but it was probably reached within the first couple of months through savings in customer service, order processing and shipping processing, in addition to prevented ordering errors and duplicate data entry.

Hindsight is 20/20

In hindsight, Brown says that he would have gotten involved earlier in item synchronization and the industry boards, so that Conair could have gotten its say in earlier.

"Some companies are back-pedaling into data sync, but don't wait -- jump in, and jump in quickly. Get in on the meetings and the phone calls, talk to the data pools and a couple of their customers," Brown advises. Conair's data pool is 1Sync, formed by the merger of UCCnet and Transora.

Brown sees data synchronization nearing mass adoption in five years, in conjunction with RFID and better EDI ordering, and achieving full adoption in ten years.

"In five years, companies will know exactly what they're selling, how much there is and where it is, and will know this at any given moment of any day," Brown predicts. "RFID is systems based, with certain access levels granted. If an item is damaged, you can check the chip and know what's in the box. This whole thing is similar to the introduction of the bar code 25 years ago with scanners in grocery stores. It was a big deal then, but now, I saw a guy the other day wearing a tattoo with a bar code on it."