As we outlined in the our Top 10 Trends to Watch in 2014 article, technology has improved and become more accessible through tools such as tablets.
With that, distributors are pushing forward on what is likely to be a long journey of ensuring the accuracy and uniformity of their data, finding the right people to analyze it and drawing and reporting conclusions they can act on.
Here are three articles that might help on that journey:
Good Product Data: Oxygen for Catalogs, Websites: Distributors who say they have an effective catalog are nearly twice as likely to have complete data and more than four times as likely to have accurate data than those with ineffective catalogs. The author of this article writes that there are more options now than ever before for improving product data that reduces time and cost for companies of all sizes.
Minding the Gap Between Data & Action: The most immediate return on investment in technology may come from technologies that have been around for a while, solutions that help distributors profit from the data already in their systems. Still, as Mike Marks says, business intelligence does not necessarily translate into executive intelligence. The gap between knowing something and effectively doing something with that knowledge is often large.
The Business Case for Better Data: This article looks at how distributors across sectors are approaching the standardization of data. It also presents the case for why standardized and clean data matters. “I think that when CEOs or CFOs are looking at financial results they don’t always make the connection that returns, errors and pricing discrepancies are directly related to the quality of the data,” says Denise Keating of DATAgility in the article.
A related article in the MDM archives is on the foodservice sector. Read about how collaboration has helped that sector push synchronized data in the channel forward.
Read more about trends in data and analytics in wholesale distribution in The Rise of ‘Little Data’ in Distribution.
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