Retailers should talk the same spec talk

People, not IT systems, need to communicate to ease the administrative burden caused by supermarkets' competing product specification systems, according to a leading software supplier.

While computerised systems are regarded as an improvement on paper-based methods, suppliers still spend hours manually entering the same data into all the supermarkets' systems because they are all slightly different.

However, this was not simply a technical issue for IT companies to solve, claimed Paul Woodward, md of Micros, which works with the top five supermarkets on specification systems.

He said: "Our next generation of products should help to address some of these issues. But IT is not holding things back; it's the fact that every retailer describes the same things differently. For example, some want suppliers to refer to an additive by its E-number, while others want them to call it by name."

The only way to tackle this was to get stakeholders in the same room and thrash out the issues, something that the Provision Trade Federation was trying to co-ordinate with a summit in the coming weeks, he said.

While own-label products were not all the same, there were often core bits of information that did not change, he said. "Take a chicken caesar salad. The salad or the chicken could vary, but the sauce might be the same."

Research commissioned by Micros revealed that standardising the specification process could reduce errors, speed up time to market and lower overheads.

One technical manager at a meat products firm, said: "All of the retailers have different requirements on allergens, traceability and so on, but at least 80% of the information is common to everybody, so it would be nice if there was more co-ordination."

One technical director said: "We've had to hire a full-time member of staff solely to handle product specifications. We have to keep going on different courses to keep up with what's happening."