Cooperation between trade and industry is improving all the time – but it is not yet good enough

GS1 Germany publishes current feasibility study

Together with the EHI Retail Institute, GS1 Germany is examining whether and to what degree retail companies and manufacturers of consumer goods use GS1 standards such as the data interchange format EANCOM ^® , cooperative processes and EPC/RFID. The result: Businesses are still a long way from wide-scale use; a great deal of optimisation potential remains unused. For example electronic invoices: German companies exchange less than 50% of all invoices and orders electronically and in a standardised form, although almost 90% of all businesses claim they would be able to do so. In the feasibility study, costs and effort, as well as data problems, are quoted as the main reasons why GS1 standards are not used from end to end. But numerous projects have shown that even small and medium-sized enterprises do not need to fear lengthy payback periods. The study is based on a survey of 157 companies in the consumer goods industry.