At the IFDA Distribution Solutions Conference today, Dot Foods, the largest food redistributor in the United States, announced that it has entered into a technology agreement with 1SYNC – the GS1 US data pool – and Aligntrac Solutions following a recently completed pilot.
Aligntrac and 1SYNC provide leading solutions for GS1 standards in data exchange among businesses, enabling them to upgrade the accuracy and availability of product information throughout the supply chain.
Dot Foods is a founding member and Governance Committee leader of the recently announced Foodservice GS1 US Standards Initiative. The Initiative is made up of 55 founding-member distributors, manufacturers and operators voluntarily committing to GS1 standards adoption for product information and electronic data exchange. Dot Foods’ suppliers that individually choose to comply with GS1 standards will publish product information to their GDSN data pool of choice, and Aligntrac will retrieve it from 1SYNC to populate Dot Foods’ back-end information systems.
Throughout the two month pilot, 1SYNC and Aligntrac worked with Dot Foods and 4 leading foodservice manufacturers to implement electronic exchange through GDSN. To measure the impact of the pilot, they tracked discrepancies between GDSN data, and contrasted that data with data that was manually entered or synchronized through EDI. Dot was impressed, and also surprised, at key results.
“We knew that we would find that GDSN was superior in data quality and integrity compared to manually entered data, but we were surprised that GDSN was also consistently more accurate than EDI data synchronization, the pinnacle we sought to achieve for so many years. With Aligntrac and 1SYNC, we will be years ahead of where we were before,” said Dick Tracy, VP of Customer Development, Dot Foods.
“We are thrilled with the results of the pilot and welcome Dot Foods as our newest customer. We look forward to helping Dot Foods achieve the many benefits of the Global Data Synchronization Network,” said Ed Howe, President, Aligntrac Solutions.
“Our choice of GS1 standards, with Aligntrac importing data to Dot Foods from the 1SYNC data pool will help us provide more accurate, up-to-date information to our customers, driving cost out of the system and helping our customers better serve their customers,” said Dick Tracy. “The reason we chose 1SYNC as our data pool is not only because they proved undeniable value during the pilot, they are also in use by scores of our manufacturers already, demonstrating their reliability beyond our pilot scope. We chose Aligntrac for data retrieval because they thoroughly impressed us throughout the pilot with their knowledge of foodservice distribution and GS1 standards– they coached us and our suppliers to get up and running successfully, and that makes all the difference.”
“The success of the Dot Foods pilot helps to demonstrate both the impact of GS1 standards in driving a new level of efficiency for adopting companies, and underscores the high quality of GS1 GDSN and its certified solutions providers. Through the pilot and through their leadership of the Foodservice GS1 US Standards Initiative, Dot Foods is leading the way to demonstrate the benefits of standards adoption, to elevate the foodservice playing field overall,” said Joe Zenobio, SVP and Chief Product and Solutions Officer.
The pilot case study will be available later this month on the Initiative website, which also provides a wealth of information about the resources available to guide implementation for foodservice manufacturers, distributors and operators that choose to adopt GS1 standards (www.gs1us.org/foodservice).