October 12, 2014 Industry news
Our global registry has reached a landmark.
We’ve seen a particular rise in the number of healthcare items over the past few years – there are now almost 1 million registered for this sector, mainly medical devices following the US Food and Drug Administration’s rule on Unique Device Identification (UDI).
Why do people use GDSN?
The purpose of GDSN is to ensure that you have shared and timely access to highly accurate product data. As it enables the creation of a single, common-to-all version of data, it greatly reduces the risk of errors and discrepancies between trading partners. The retail and foodservice sectors have benefited from GDSN for many years now. Typical benefits include improved on-shelf availability and vastly more efficient logistics, accounting, customer service and inventory management functions through reduced supply chain disruptions.
Roman Coba, Chief Information Officer at McCain Foods Limited, explains: “Increased speed to market, improved accuracy and a more efficient supply chain were the main reasons for our adoption of global data synchronisation. GDSN not only means that we and our trading partners are using the same data, but GS1 has also given us the data quality that we are looking for.”
The same benefits are equally applicable in healthcare – improved availability of healthcare items in hospitals (where they are most needed), reduced procurement costs and increased supply chain efficiency. Furthermore, the recently-published NHS eProcurement Strategy sets out that all procurement data for NHS trusts will only be sourced from suppliers using a certified GS1 datapool.
What’s next?
GDSN launched in October 2004 with just 74,000 items shared among trading partners in 13 countries. It reached 10 million items in 2012 and today over 25,000 companies in more than 150 countries take advantage of the supply chain efficiency benefits it offers.
Looking forward, we expect to see usage of GDSN increase in the healthcare, retail and foodservice sectors.
This is being driven by a general growing demand for data on many levels including on how products are delivered to market from handling instructions and traceability attributes to nutrition information, regulatory compliance and classification.