SCO Data Standards

Overview

Data standards provide the common language than enables efficient information sharing.  While global efforts such as GS1 have the potential to transform collaboration within the Foodservice industry, it is imperative that operator, suppliers, and distributors striving to create an optimized supply chain today must more affectively align on the rules and format governing information sharing.

Looking to address this need, the SCO Development Board worked on creating tools and frameworks to enable operators, suppliers, and distributors to develop standards around their communication flows.  Key frameworks developed included identification of different types of data standards, a data management roadmap, key questions for partners to ask each other regarding data standards, and recommended data standards for the nine critical data flows established in the development of the communication map.

Benefits

The effective use of data standards drives efficiency in collaboration between partners.  Historically, many organizations created manual workarounds to address data inconsistencies.   With the growing need for accurate information as quickly as possible, it is much more efficient for partners to work collaboratively to establish rules and data formatting standards upfront than to manually map data after the fact.

Application

Partners can use the Data Standard tools to initiate a discussion on collaborative data management that should lead to the creation of specific rules and data formats that will govern the sharing of data between partners.  The data management roadmap is to be used to benchmark an organization’s internal sophistication around data management.  The questions are to be used as partners interact directly with each other and can serve as a starting point to creating your own data governance approach.  Lastly, the recommend data standards for the critical data flows can be used to benchmark how partners currently share key pieces of data.

Worksheets & Tools

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