GS1 Global Data Model Market Stages Guideline

Today, complete and accurate product data becomes available at various times in the lifecycle (or market stages) of a product. For example, when a retailer receives product data early in the product lifecycle, some information may not yet be available or may be sent only as preliminary data. This causes industry a significant challenge in mitigating the impact of poor or outdated product data. Product market stages reflect key business processes, such as listing and ordering of products, moving and storing, and selling the products to consumers. The goal of the market stages work is to achieve a meaningful alignment necessary for those working in supply chain roles across trading partners, data exchange solutions, content service providers and GS1 Member Organisations.

To improve the current challenges that industry experiences with poor or missing product information, guidelines have been developed for all Global Data Model (GDM) global and regional layer attributes to specify the market stage when data is required by downstream recipients and whether data delivered at that stage shall be available from the brand owner as a preliminary or final value. Splitting the data exchange into phases by market stage improves the overall data process to become more agile and lean, while reducing the incentive to exchange incomplete or preliminary information before it is required. For the GDM community who exchanges product master data, the roadmap of when an attribute is desired based on market stage can provide the organization with what is needed to define the timeliness of trade and reduce the likelihood of delayed or unstructured data.

Tracing missing information very often delays product listings and at the same time has a negative impact on the overall time-to-market. Incomplete or incorrect product information is a major cost driver in the value chain and leads to lost sales.

Benefits for industry include:

1. Retailers will receive the information in the stage it is needed.

2. Brand owners won’t stress an organisation to provide all data at once.

3. Data recipients can identify when attributes assigned to a market stage are complete and available for relevant business processes.

4. There will be less incentive to rush data and send content that is “not ready” resulting in poor data quality.

5. Data recipients can trust that data is complete and accurate at each market stage or business process.

The market stages information presented in this document has been developed as a guideline to enhance data exchange between trading partners that have agreed to align with this specification. While this guideline may be valuable for improving data exchange outside of the Global Data Model, adoption and implementation of the GDM is recommended in conjunction with Market Stages. It is important to note that Market Stages is intended to be fully optional on top of the GDM and Global Data Synchronisation Network (GDSN) standards within a market (i.e., data exchange will never be blocked based on market stage information).

The development effort has been performed keeping in mind the same concept applied by GDM, i.e., it is technology agnostic and can be applied across multiple technologies. This document does not imply an implementation technology. However, a subsequent phase of Market Stages development may initially focus on GDSN, since data exchange in several steps according to market stages will require some degree of structure and automation.

Implementation of the GS1 GDM Market Stages Guideline will be determined by mutual agreement between trading partners, e.g., whether a data recipient accepts "preliminary" data with the ability to update records as future data is pushed by the data sender, OR the data recipient waits until all indicators are marked “final” before ingesting the data. The timing of when each market stage should be “final” (e.g., number of days/weeks before a business process) will differ by trading partner and product and is not specified in this guideline.

Market Stages information is provided for each attribute in the Global and Regional layers of the Global Data Model within the GDM Combined Models tab in the GS1 GDM standard spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet can be accessed via the following link:

■ https://www.gs1.org/standards/gs1-global-data-model

The Market Stages Guideline provides designations that indicate the market stage when each attribute is needed by industry and whether the data can be preliminary or must be final for each stage. Note that for the purpose of assigning market stage information, the List and Order business processes are combined into one category. Data required for these two business processes were found to be substantially aligned, with some exceptions marked clearly in the spreadsheet data.

The spreadsheet includes a Market Stages READ ME tab that provides detailed information regarding the definition of the market stages terms and values used to populate the data columns.