Getting Ready for 2020

This is your year.

You have decided to put an initiative together to once and for all get your product specifications organized and streamlined for the benefit of everyone in your organization. It’s been a long road, but this is your year.

6 Steps To Getting Your Product Specifications in Order

Here are the 6 Next Steps to making this the year you get your product information / specifications in order:

1. Determine how many systems currently house all or a portion of your specifications. That includes inventory systems, EDI, GDSN, accounting systems, purchasing systems, label and nutrition, and perhaps others. Map it out and outline which pieces are where.
   
   
2. Define who the “system owners” are of each other system housing the product specification information. System Owners are the people from your company who are responsible for defining system requirements from a business standpoint. This is key. Product Information may be organized in a particular way for one department and another way for a department right across the hall. Knowing who is organizing the data in each system helps understand data structure, needs, and wants and who the decision makers are if changes or enhancements are needed.
   
   
3. Define your “gaps.” Once you know what you have, it is important to write down what you don’t have and need. Do you have package size but miss inner bag size? Do you have product allergens but miss dietary lifestyle questions? It would be helpful to ask system owners to help you understand their gaps so they may be incorporated into your centralized System of Record (SOR).
   
   
4. Determine Objectives for the new System of Record. After looking at all of the other systems and understanding what they do and do not have, what will your new System of Record have and not have? Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the new SOR should house everything. Not everything is helpful or needed and at times an excess of data can make things more time consuming and difficult to accurately maintain. Remember that for a system to be accurate, is must be maintained. If you require 100 pieces of data then those 100 data points must be validated periodically for accuracy. Choose Wisely. Your objectives can include information needed as far as 3-5 years ahead. Forecasting use beyond that is risky.
   
   
5. Write everything down. No Seriously. Write it all down. DO IT! Someone gets promoted, people change companies, memory fails you. Someone doesn’t hear correctly or misunderstands. Eliminate these risks as much as possible by writing everything down and even drawing pictures where possible. Some may prefer to organize information in Powerpoint so that the accumulation of information is more of a presentation rather than a book. That is fine. Just take the extra time to jot down notes and share them with the group.
   
   
6. Put dates down on paper for all to see. No better way to get people to perk up in the afternoon than giving them a date they must commit to. One of the biggest reasons Product Management initiatives fail is that no one commits to certain and realistic dates. Imagine that everyone around the table will be changing jobs in the next 12-18 months. So if the project is not completed within that time, one of the legs may fall out from under you. Realistic dates must consider existing company projects and events. A realistic timeline may be as follows:

• Due By March 1: Receive SKU report from IT
• Due By March 14: Clean SKU Data and convert to product information
• Due by March 30: Cleaned SKU / product information report to be spot checked or reviewed by project stakeholders for validation
• Due By April 15: Validate Product Categories to be loaded in the SOR
• Due By April 30: Load Product information into new System of Record

While the above is an example, it hopefully gives you an idea of what a focused and realistic timeline looks like. Don’t leave out the details of who should be doing these functions and what specifically is being asked.

Keep in mind that as your company’s project manager, you will have to focus between 40-120 hours on this effort to make it successful. You can choose to focus those hours in a very short time frame up front (to organize and delegate at the beginning), or you can expend that time over a longer period. If you have a short window of time at the beginning where you can get your arms around the effort, that is the ideal option. Time spent communicating and organizing early on will save you in the long run.

Keep in mind, Share-ify’s Service Team of trained professionals is there to assist you and your team as an extended staff of your company. Allow us to help you.

The implementation of Share-ify as your System of Record gives you a semi-custom method to implement a product management platform. Share-ify allows you to configure for your business needs without the need for heavy custom development that can slow down projects and create business risk.

Please contact your account representative or Share-ify Service Team for more information today.