I strolled into an airport convenience store the other day to purchase a candy bar, a vice I only allow myself when traveling.  Perhaps it’s unfortunate that I travel a lot, but this justification allows me to sleep at night.

Anyway, I happened to walk up to the register just as the cashier was celebrating just having sold four 256MB USB memory sticks.  The two management employees conversing with her were amazed that a passenger had bought such a large quantity, but the cashier said, “well, they were $5.99 – you don’t see a deal like that every day.”  The discussion quickly turned from celebratory to disastrous (keep in mind I am standing at the register waiting to pay $2 for a candy bar this whole time – gradually feeling more and more ashamed that I’m even in the place).  The cashier grabbed one of the remaining items hanging on the wall and flipped it over to look at the price sticker, which stated “$59.99”.  Oops!  Someone, in their zeal to finish tagging the memory stick boxes with price stickers and move on to more exciting products (like Butterfinger Crisp candy bars), forgot a ‘9’ – and what a faux pas that turned out to be!

I won’t go on to tell the rest of the story, as it became sad watching the cashier argue that she just did her job and rang the items up at the price that was stuck on the back.  By this time they finally realized they needed to get me out of the store before continuing and so finally took my money and relinquished me to go off and eat my way into a state of chocolate-peanut butter bliss.  Of course, by this time I had lost interest in the candy and rather wanted to ponder what led to such a terrible hit to this little store’s profitability.  Was it the fact that instead of linking the barcode on the package to an electronically-stored price in the computer system, someone was relying on one clerk to properly tag the item using a manual pricing gun, and another clerk to properly enter the price when ringing up the item?  Or was it that the manual process at point-of-sale was the result of incomplete or inaccurate data provided to the store by the memory stick manufacturer?

You see, I like these little retail mysteries.  Because they make clear the everyday examples of why data quality and data synchronization are so important.  If a manufacturer can provide pricing electronically when sending the product information to the retailer, linking the UPC number to the price, the retailer can then flow this data automatically to their point-of-sale system, use scanning equipment to scan the UPC, and see the price come up for them, rather than each of these steps being handled manually.  GXS is in the business of providing services to help customers gather data, audit it for accuracy, transform it into electronic formats, and transmit it to trading partners – providing visibility throughout the process, and ensuring that what arrived at the end was intended and intact.  This is a fascinating concept.  Creating efficiency in the exchange of business documents.  Okay, maybe it’s not awe-inspiring to you.  But it’s certainly clear to me why it’s so mission-critical.  Because when a customer goes to buy a leather cover for their handheld PDA, and ends up receiving an IBM server instead (a story relayed to me by a colleague which has P&L problems that reach far beyond my memory stick example), the consumer may win, but the retailer certainly doesn’t.  And you can believe that the manufacturer will feel the upstream effects of that as a reduction in future purchase orders.  So, how much is bad data costing you?