Every Distributor Wants Your Data in a Different Format

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A manufacturer's product data goes out to distributors one customer at a time. This one wants a spreadsheet with their column names across the top, that one takes a syndication feed, and a third takes whatever arrives and maps it themselves, then calls three weeks later because a fitting went up on their site with no connection size on it. Manufacturers ASA has talked to describe feeding anywhere from a dozen to better than fifty distributor partners this way, each one in the format that partner asked for.

None of that is product work. Every new distributor is a new mapping. Every attribute you add, every category you split, every time somebody upstream renames a field, the work multiplies by the number of partners you serve. The manufacturer still pulling it by hand out of ERP systems inherited through acquisition pays that multiplier hardest. The ASA Product Data Standard exists to collapse that into one. One field set, twenty-seven of them required, populated once, that any distributor can read without a special version.

Agreeing with that is the easy part, and most manufacturers do. The harder question is the next one, which is how far your own data sits from the standard right now. The templates and the data dictionary have been on asa.net since launch so any member could work that out, and working it out means putting a live export next to the full field specification and going line by line. That is a week of somebody's time to produce a number, and a week is hard to get approved for a number.

ASA said in May it was building a way to answer that. It is running now. Send the file and ASA runs it against the standard for you. Not a file in the standard's format, since that is the thing you do not have yet. Whatever your system produces today. An ERP or MDM extract, a PIM export, a spec workbook somebody keeps by hand, a spreadsheet split across four tabs because the data points differ by product type. Take the price columns out first, because ASA does not need them. Nine manufacturers have sent one since, nearly all of them since June, running from a few hundred items to close to twenty thousand.

The file stays yours. What comes back goes to the company that sent it, and ASA publishes no score, no ranking, and no comparison of one manufacturer against another. ASA defines which fields exist and how they are formatted. What a company puts in them is that company's decision.

The first document says what is in the file, field by field, with counts, and recommends nothing. When the file warrants it, and it usually does, a second one sorts those same findings into what to take on first and what can wait. It separates what is structural from what is content. Those two get fixed by different people. ASA does not do the work inside your systems and does not stand in for whoever you already have doing it.

That sort is most of the value. Pipe gets priced by the foot and stocked in twenty-foot lengths, fittings sell each and ship by the box, so a unit of measure sitting inside a column header instead of its own

field is an afternoon of work. A product dimension held in your packaging record rather than your product record is an ERP conversation. Both come back as gaps, and only one of them is yours to fix this month, so knowing which is which is what puts the quarter into the half you can actually move.

The findings are rarely the ones people expect. One export carried UPCs on most of its products, and a large share of them were no longer twelve digits. Number formatting upstream had stripped the leading zeros, so the codes came through short. Nothing in the file looked wrong, and it syndicated without complaint. Those items landed on the distributor side matching nothing already in the item master, which is how a product ends up in a customer's catalog twice, or not at all, and never surfaces when a contractor searches for it.

Another file came back with a required field at zero percent. The column was in the file. It was empty, and the content it wanted was sitting in a different column the export had named for invoicing. Present, populated, invisible. Problems like that hold for years, because inside the company nothing looks broken.

The first assessment is rarely the last one, because most of what it raises are mapping questions and those get settled between your people and ASA. One manufacturer is several passes into their file with questions still open, including whether a catalog part number means the model or the full part number. The corrections run both ways. One guide had a manufacturer's series number mapped into the catalog part number field, that surfaced on the review call, and the corrected mapping went back with the next version.

Sometimes what has to change is the standard. One assessment came back showing Length empty across the file. The products have length. They are sold by the foot, and the standard's Length field takes inches and nothing else, so there was no valid way to record it. The file was not the problem, and that one went into the standard's change process.

What it costs you to start is one export, and pulling it takes most people under an hour. The questions that come back after the first assessment take more. There is no charge. If you would rather open with a conversation than a file, one manufacturer did exactly that. Email PDS@asa.net or Nils Swenson at nswenson@asa.net, say which product lines you want assessed, and he will send a way to move the file if it is too large to attach. You will know how far off you are, and you will not have spent a project finding out.

By Nils Swenson