The Need for Product Data Quality Assurance in the Retail Fast Moving Consumer Goods Sector

More data are being exchanged electronically than ever before and business operations have become increasingly reliant on them. Poor quality data are a primary reason for many problems, causing service failure and rework throughout the supply chain. Therefore, timeliness, accuracy, completeness, consistency and overall quality of data have become critically important. While there are many reliable software solutions for customer-oriented business sectors, the product-oriented industries have yet to catch up. There are a number of techniques that can be used to assure product data quality. This paper gives an overview of the most important of them and analyses the solutions offered by the industrial project partner GXS Ltd. There is a clear need to automate the process of product data quality business rule generation in this sector. This paper proposes a design for a prototype system to perform such automation.