ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- The Petroleum Convenience Alliance for Technology Standards (PCATS) and 1SYNC, a Data Pool Solution, announced the successful conclusion of the PCATS Gateway pilot program, powered by 1SYNC and sponsored by the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS).
The pilot, which in February 2007 and concluded on April 13, 2007, consisted of five retail participants ranging in store count from six stores to more than 1,500 stores, and six supplier participants including three multi-national suppliers and three regional or local suppliers.[image-nocss]
Retailer participants included Clinard Oil, EZ-Mart Stores, Nice N'Easy Grocery Shoppes, The Pantry and Town & Country Food Stores. Supplier participants included Arctic Glacier Ice, Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages (a division of Cadbury Schweppes plc), Frito-Lay (a division of PepsiCo Inc.), Panhandle Popcorn Co. and The Coca-Cola Co. CMi Solutions (CMI) and PDI were the solution providers that assisted their retail customers with connecting and integrating the transmitted data into the retailer's pricebook.
PCATS announced the results of the pilot yesterday at NACStech 2007 in Nashville, Tenn.
The PCATS Gateway is a secure communications pipeline enabling trading partners in the convenience and petroleum channel to synchronize an item's price and promotion information using the standard PCATS-NAXML format in order to populate their pricebook electronically. PCATS-NAXML has been designed by the PCATS EB2B Retail Working Group to be a low-cost, effective and simple industry format for electronic business documents.
The objective for the pilot was to assist trading partners in achieving supply chain benefits associated with electronic pricebook synchronization, and the best way to achieve that was by partnering with PCATS with the sponsorship of NACS, said Bob Noe, 1SYNC's CEO. We are extremely pleased that the positive results of the pilot confirm our expectations that the Gateway is a cost-effective method for convenience/petroleum retailers to synchronize data with their suppliers.
He concluded, We believe that the PCATS Gateway will expand and accelerate the commercial value of data synchronization in the petroleum/convenience channel.
Matt Paduano, vice president of information for Nice N' Easy, said, The 1SYNC pilot project was something that the industry has been clamoring for years to be developed and is something that is long overdue for the convenience store industry. This process will allow even the smallest retailer and the smallest vendors to share electronic data without a huge investment in hardware, software, or technical expertise. The pilot went well with the two vendors that we tested with and it integrated into our system seamlessly.
Jim Mock, president of Panhandle Popcorn, said, Panhandle Popcorn Co. is a small business, and I was uncertain as to the complexity of the pilot program; however, I found the whole process to be informative and not as challenging as expected. This is the next best thing to keying in my information directly into my retailer's system. For a small, regional company such as ours, the Gateway proved to be very easy to use.
He added, We originally thought it would be a long time before we could participate in data synchronization, but the Gateway showed us that we can do it today.
Suppliers of all sizes now have a viable solution that sends pricebook information to their trading partners quicker and more accurately than ever before. Pilot participants believe that the PCATS Gateway will lower costs because they won't be required to build expensive solutions that have to be customized for each of their trading partners. These results validate that any Convenience Petroleum retailer can use a single industry standard message.
PCATS was founded in September 2003 to continue the development and maintenance for standards work initiated under the NACS Technology Standards project. With more than 160 retailer and supplier members, the group's membership represents more than 22,000 convenience stores.
Lawrenceville, N.J.-based 1SYNC, a not-for-profit subsidiary of GS1 US, offers a range of data synchronization services that eliminate costly data errors, increase supply chain efficiencies and promote the advancement of next-generation technologies, such as the Electronic Product Code (EPC).
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