Brian Maloney

How to Address GPOs and Double Dipping

Answers Systems — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:55:16 GMT

It’s almost impossible for manufacturers and distributors to keep track of all the locations in the foodservice industry and which Group Purchasing Organization (GPO) each location may/may not belong to today…and that’s hoping each location belongs to just one GPO when it relates to foodservice purchasing.

The issue is so mind boggling at times that whenever the topic comes up, everyone just shakes their heads, agrees that it’s a big problem, and then they move on without even trying to figure out possible solutions.

Here’s a solution . . . .the Foodservice Industry needs One Source that maintains all the GPO’s and which locations link to each one. This One Source would be independent of any distributor, manufacturer, or operator. Anyone in the industry that needs to know location-level information by GPO could go to the One Source and that’s it.

Let’s use an example: Manufacturer A wants to set up a contract with Novation and Premier. The deviated pricing will go through Distributor B. The distributor is handed these new agreements and instead of trying to figure out what locations in their system they should link to these two pricing agreements, the distributor simply pulls this information from the independent One Source of information. The GPOs know they must continue to load their location lists into this One Source. That’s it.

If there are times when a single location is showing up on more than one GPO’s location list, that location is flagged and it won’t funnel into any distributors systems for pricing until the GPOs can agree who owns that location. The One Source company would be responsible for catching these and working with the GPO’s. The way this has to work is that a major distributor or set of distributors and/or manufacturers must agree to this concept and then mandate to the GPOs that they load their location lists into this independent One Source company.

It would work. So what distributors and/or manufacturers are ready to solve this?

Hi, we’re Answers Systems and our GLN number is 1100001011810

Answers Systems — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:32:11 GMT

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

Sodexo-ITN Contract Management Initiative

Answers Systems — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:27:52 GMT

by Brian Maloney

It still amazes me every day how complicated this foodservice industry is. When people ask me what I do, they listen to my answer and say things like “wow, I never realized there was a need for that.” Once you find yourself in this industry, you never leave. It sucks you in. You find yourself sitting at a restaurant table with friends looking at the back of sugar packets just to see who the distributor is. I’ve been in “the industry” now for 16 years and every time I think I have it figured out, the industry throws you another curve ball. I think the new Sodexo-ITN initiative is just that . . . a curve ball. It’s something new to the industry, and we all have to adjust. I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this new initiative, it’s just different.

If you don’t know what this new initiative is, this post is probably not for you. If you’re one of the hundreds of foodservice manufacturers dealing with Sodexo, and more specifically a National Account Manager at one of those manufacturers, then this post will give you some insight into how Answers Systems is working with ITN to ensure efficiencies for our manufacturer clients and their ContractPro® users while meeting Sodexo's business needs.

Depending on who you are, this initiative means something different to you. I work at Answers Systems. We have many foodservice manufacturer clients that have contracts with Sodexo. These clients use our ContractPro trade promotion management solution to enter and manage their contracts. We want to eliminate as much duplication of their effort as possible when it comes to maintaining their Sodexo contract within both the ContractPro solution and ITN CaRMA tool. So, what this means to us is that we have to build a bridge that takes the contract out of the ContractPro solution and, with the help of ITN, automatically loads the contract into ITN’s CaRMA tool. Our goal is to save our clients time and help them preserve and/or gain efficiencies.

Answers Systems is here to help you if help is needed – you can talk to others in the same shoes you wear. You are not alone! Future posts will go into more detail on the actual initiative, what we learned along the way, and how the process is working. Hope you enjoy.