06.05.07

I’m fortunate to be attending U-Connect 2007 this year in Orlando, Florida at the Gaylord Palms (a slightly scaled down version of the Gaylord Opryland where I was a few weeks ago). Strangely enough, Microsoft Tech-Ed 2007 is also going on here in Orlando this week, but this place is so enormous it just doesn’t show any crowding.

U-Connect is a really interesting conference, because it gives you a snapshot of just how large the retail industry is. As you walk the halls and see name tag after name tag of famous CPGs and retailers, it is amazing. As far as I can tell, every major retailer is here, and hundreds and hundreds of consumer goods companies. U-Connect is an industry gathering to discuss standards, and educate people about standards, principally for EDI, Global Data Synchronization, Barcoding and RFID. Itis also an excellent forumforretailersand suppliers to discuss shared issues, changes coming, and the ever popular “mandates” around data synchronization and RFID.

But another major presence here at U-Connect are the standards organizations.

The name U-Connect comes from the former name for the North American standards group (UCC, or Uniform Code Council, who managed the bar code system for the US), but now the organization is known as GS1 US. GS1 is an international organization that is organized on a national level (each country has their own GS1 organization), with each of these groups federated into a larger whole. Aside from the traditional role of managing item numbers, GS1 also helps coordinate the GDSN(Global Data Synchronization Network),by publishing standards, educating, and often contracting companies to operate “data pools” that are used by suppliers and retailers to exchange item data.

The other major organization at this year’s show is VICS (Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions). VICS is a fantastic organization that provides a forum for working on process efficiency across retail supply chains. VICS may well be best known for its pioneering work on CPFR (Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment).

The final leg of the table (or stool — if you want to group retailers and their suppliers, but don’t…) are the technology vendors, which is where we fit in. Supplying the retail industry is a fascinating job for a technology vendor, let me tell you. When you realize that retailers are fantastically complex entities that are completely dependent on other companies not only for products, but also for the product even arriving at their doors, you start to understand why standards and scalable processes are absolutelyrequired.It is the job of the technology vendors to take the standards that are produced and create inter-operable products from them.

Basically, you have an ongoing process shepherded by standards organizations that attempt to serve the entire retail supply chain, requiring the long-term cooperative production of standards b hundreds of people from companies that compete more fiercely with one another than almost any other industry, and the implementation of those standards — in an inter-operable way — by an array of technology vendors whose very survival depends on beating each other in sales opportunities…

I love this industry!