ALEXANDRIA, VA (May 21, 2003) – The WorldWide Retail Exchange (WWRE), the premier business-to-business exchange for the international retail and consumer goods industry, launched Version 2.0 of the WWRE® WorldWide Item Management (WIM) solution. WIM 2.0 represents a significant milestone in the WWRE’s efforts to drive deeper adoption of global data synchronization on both the demand and supply sides of the industry.
"When we first looked at ways to unleash the promise of standardized data, we saw a problem - no single solution provider was tackling the challenge of ensuring that data is delivered directly to and from the back-end systems of retailers and suppliers," noted Colin Dyer, CEO of the WWRE. "We’re providing trading partners an end-to-end data synchronization solution that enables them to leverage their existing or emerging back-end infrastructure with rules-based workflow specific to their businesses."
"With more than half of our members from Asia, Europe and North America committed to implementing WIM in 2003/4, we are keenly focused on delivering a clear path to the meaningful use of standardized data," added Cindy Cruzado, Director of WIM at the WWRE. "WIM 2.0 not only provides a single point of access to product information for these retailers and manufacturers, but it also acts as a foundation to deploying standardized collaborative processes at full scale, such as CPFR®, product design and development, direct store delivery, scan-based trading and RFID."
Featured enhancements of WIM 2.0 include:
Validation and rules engines, which help retailers to receive pre-validated and pre-approved product data. Also available is the ability to help manufacturers ensure that they are meeting retailer-specific item setup requirements by enabling custom approval rules and workflow. This ensures the appropriate buyer is notified of product changes and is able to quickly view, reject or approve changes for synchronization;
The ability to streamline content uploads, reducing the time required for updates;
A single standardized XML format, including core data, country-specific data and relationship dependent data. Based on EAN.UCC requirements, this will advance the Exchange’s progression towards full WWRE-UCCnet interoperability, by early 2004.
Concurrent with WIM 2.0, the WWRE has defined working relationships with leading systems integration providers and offers step-by-step strategy and services associated with meshing the solution and workflow to the source and recipient back-end systems behind the firewall. The WWRE is also building standards-based connections with local catalog providers across the world, with UCCnet as the global registry, to build out the global data synchronization network.
Available in eight languages, WIM is a comprehensive global solution for the search, introduction and maintenance of product information, enabling organizations from across the globe to share standardized, consistent data throughout the supply chain. In addition to assuring data integrity and standards compliance, the solution also provides a single point of integration to facilitate item synchronization with all of an organization’s trading partners. In doing so, WIM serves retailers and manufacturers as a source and recipient data pool and global data synchronization engine.
About the WWRE®
The WWRE® is the premier Internet-based business-to-business exchange for retailers and suppliers. Designed to facilitate and simplify trading between manufacturers, retailers and suppliers, the WWRE® currently consists of 64 members from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and South America with combined sales of approximately U.S. $900 billion. To date, the WWRE® has saved its members over $900 million through the use of online negotiations, its first product offering. For more information, visit the website at www.wwre.org or www.worldwideretailexchange.org.
For more information:
Keri Phifer
703.234.5056
kphifer@wwre.org
or
Summer Stitz
202.223.4933
sstitz@stantoncomm.com
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