Providers say collaborative product information management will enable customers to draw insight, profits from RFID data
San Jose and Santa Clara, CA — October 27, 2004 — Business intelligence (BI) solutions provider Business Objects has announced an agreement with Velosel Corp., a provider of collaborative product information management (CPIM) software, to provide a solution to their customers by combining elements of the BusinessObjects BI platform with the Velosel5 CPIM application software.
The combined solution will provide a collaborative product information management system so customers to create, manage and synchronize product information within the enterprise, with trading partners and across the entire supply chain.
The providers said their customers in retail and consumer product goods (CPG) firms should also be able to conduct immediate analysis of product information, trading partner collaboration and business process performance that come from manufacturing, point-of-sale, distribution and inventory management systems by way of global data synchronization (GDS) and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.
Business Objects commented that RFID will create new electronic data requirements, and that different systems might value similar attributes of a product line differently. Point-of-sale systems, for example, would be likely to emphasize price and quantity, while a warehouse distribution system might focus on weight and size.
These disparities, according to the provider, can create a problem when attempting to analyze performance in making, selling and stocking products, as can data growth.
In response to these challenges, Velosel said it keeps a complete set of product information synchronized in a central repository that feeds other data-consuming systems that typically only have a subset of the product information based on their specialized function, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), logistics and manufacturing.
This gives Business Objects a central place from which to obtain information on product assortment performance, stock visibility, return management and promotion campaign effectiveness. The combined Business Objects and Velosel solution can do this type of analysis immediately on RFID data.
"Having the right partner is important because the data management challenge with RFID is massive," said Prakash Nanduri, co-founder and vice president of strategic relations for Velosel. "For example, some analysts predict that RFID systems may produce up to five terabytes of data per day. It is essential that this data is accurate, actionable and synchronized with all the appropriate enterprise systems."
