The Bill of Materials for Your Product Data
It’s Monday morning, and the EDI feed to your largest customer is down. Not a connection error. A data mismatch. The customer’s system is rejecting line items because the units of measure don’t match what lives in their catalog. Your team is now scrambling to fi x a taxonomy that lives entirely in a spreadsheet, and in the mind of the person who built it.
Digging in, you find a bigger problem. Three separate SKUs, but only one base part: one raw, one plated, one plated and one patched. All three carry the same description, “Hex Head Cap Screw, Grade 8.” No finish listed, and no way to tell which process step a given part is even at. A customer ordering off that description has a one-in-three shot at the right part. A distributor trying to map it into their own catalog has no shot at all.