Infosys-Oracle Blog

As each day passes by, every country pan globe is making its operating laws more stringent than ever before. This leads to maintaining items or products in specific labels formats and colors, holograms, compositions etc. This would imply associating items with certain critical attributes that need to be tracked with them. For instance it is important to associate a Country of Origin and Manufacturer's Identifier with each item for a Food Retailer. These are mandated by international agencies for compliance and regulation. Issue is more challenging if item life span is short and old items are getting replaced by new ones.

Similarly, in the printing and digital solution industry brand information needs to be associated with the generic product code to arrive at the final item specification. There are multiple brands of peripherals available in the market which when linked to the Generic product code result in a final assembly or end machine product.

For a responsive supply chain to operate at its optimum levels, organizations with central procurement/manufacturing and global distributions need to manage these requirements. Is there really an optimum solution that exists? Sometimes a new item creation might be the way forward, whereas sometimes items revision might be the best bet. This is the Glocal approach. When organizations creating different item numbers it is helpful in catering to each unique requirement separately. But it brings along with it immense data management issues together with forecasting and planning. Creating different item revisions helps in effective planning and forecasting but poses challenge in effective execution of required revision usage in desired destination countries.

We might not have a panacea here and organizations need to strive for a balancing act. The act could depend on the system landscape as well as infrastructure.  Is there a recommended approach that organizations could adopt to remain world class and also comply with legal and agency mandates? Master Data Maintenance is the backbone of successful and robust systems, it is the plinth of a strong architecture.