Trade Service Reaches Out to Customers
Posted On July 22, 2008
9
0 Received a copy of a letter from a distributor friend, that Trade Service sent to its electrical distribution customers. Interesting how a company begins to reveal itself when it needs to become competitive / visible again.
Key points from the letter include:
- “As a Trade Service customer, this does not affect you.” From this we gather that Trade Service customers will experience no interruption of service due to the ending of the data sharing relationship with IDEA.
- As previously stated in their press release, the company has over 1000 electrical distributors as customers and provides them with 2.6M skus of data. Over 1M skus are attributed / have graphics.
This bodes more questions:
- If Trade Service can guarantee uninterrupted service to its customers, how much data were they really receiving from IDEA? (probably none or very little)
- Conversely, if IDEA’s data has been interrupted, how much were they receiving from Trade Service?
- Since data, and its corresponding changes/updates, is critical to the success of a distributor (unless they are receiving information directly from manufacturers), when do current IDEA users lose access to Trade Service supplied data?
- What is IDEA doing to respond? In our posting last week we essentially asked “where are they going to get their data from?” especially since the agreement is now concluded.
- Will IDEA’s strategy require manufacturers to incur additional costs to provide data to IDEA? Will distributors have to alter their systems (and incur costs) to accept different formats? Will software providers have to change / enhance their systems to accommodate different field sizes (probably a reason to justify the next “version” and charge distributors a fee!)?
- Given that distributors use commodity codes for pricing, quotations, inventory management, report generation and more (and that their sales/purchasing history is dependent upon these codes), what is IDEA’s “go-forward strategy” and how much time will it cost distributors to adjust their systems to something else?
- And isn’t it interesting that both associations, NEMA and NAED, “co-owners” of IDEA, haven’t said a word on the issue? Very surprising, especially given their penchant for speaking about IDEA (especially NAED).
Unfortunately it appears that the data issue is creating more questions than answers are being given to.
If you receive more on this topic, from either Trade Service or IDEA, feel free to forward it to either David Gordon or Allen Ray and we’ll post it, anonymously, for all to be informed.
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