by Brian Maloney
Hi, I’m Brian Maloney and my Social Security number is…….well I won’t go that far but I can tell you this: Hi, we’re Answers Systems and our GLN number is 1100001011810. So there you have it. Take this number and use it wherever you like. After years of preaching standardization in the Foodservice Industry and Contract Management more specifically, we figured we better eat our own words and sign us up for a GLN. If you don’t know what a GLN is, it’s a unique number for our place of business.
Just like a GTIN is a unique number for a specific product. If everyone were to use GTIN’s and GLN’s when trading data, the Foodservice Industry would catch up to many other industries who’ve standardized their data long ago. If you’re in the industry you know the deal. Every distributor has a different number for the exact same product Manufacturer A has. So if we all used the same number, we’d eliminate errors and speed up the process. Same for GLN’s and all the locations. If we used the same numbers for locations we’d again reduce errors and speed up the process. If you want to look into it for your company, here’s the info: GS1 US Customer Service at info@gs1us.org or +1 937.435.3870, Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET.
So there you have it. You now have our number…use it. I dare you. We’ve already started working with various distributors and 3rd parties we exchange data with to start using this number. We hope you do to.
Technorati tags:
data acquisition,
data synchronization,
GLN,
GTIN