Discover the unique collaboration between GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg and Zeticon
- Klant
- GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg
- Probleem
- With the increasing growth in online sales and new marketplaces offering the possibility to easily sell products, the demand for up-to-date, high-quality and accessible digital assets has increased. GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg therefore went in search of a new solution for the redundant storage and exchange of digital assets.
- Oplossing
- A redundant, efficient repository for the large amount of data seamlessly integrated with existing applications
About GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg
GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg is part of the global GS1 organisation, which is dedicated to the development and implementation of global standards and solutions for identifying, capturing and sharing data in various sectors. This non-profit organisation helps companies improve the efficiency, security and visibility of their supply chains.
The Challenge
"My Product Manager" is an application from GS1 that allows companies to efficiently manage and share their product information. It helps companies ensure that their product data is accurate, up-to-date and compliant with global standards. This is crucial for supply chain efficiency, regulatory compliance and customer satisfaction. Through the platform, companies can create and manage unique identifiers for products.
The demand for up-to date, high-quality and easily accessible digital assets continues to increase due to the growth of online sales. Therefore, GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg started looking for a new solution for the storage and exchange of digital assets. The solution should be fully integrated with the My Product Manager cloud platform that will serve as a front-end solution for suppliers and retailers.
The needs of GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg
To find the right partner, GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg carried out an in-depth research. This resulted in a shortlist of suppliers that had to meet an extensive list of requirements in terms of technical, security, performance, data exchange, etc. Here, Zeticon's information platform meets all the main requirements.
Prior to and during the project, discussions with Zeticon were always very valuable. They listened carefully to our specific needs and communicated transparently about which integration possibilities and features were already available and which would require additional development. This way, we clearly knew what to expect at the start of the implementation.
The Solution
GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg's working group worked closely with Zeticon's experts to configure a platform to fit this unique use case.
- Redundant, efficient repository for digital assets
Zeticon's information platfom forms an efficient hub for the storage and exchange of GS1 Belgium & Luxembourg's large quantity, and diversity of digital assets. The large amount of data also creates many challenges in terms of performance. On a regular basis, Zeticon provides load tests on the platform. This ensures the performance of the system and allows GS1 to load a large amount of data into the system at short notice without any worries.
Control of duplicates
GS1's customers, being suppliers and manufacturers of products sold in retail (FMCG, DIY, etc.),send a hierarchy of trade items where each trade item can contain 1 or more images, or other digital assets (such as manuals, safety sheets, etc.). For GS1, the duplicate check in Zeticon's information platform, using an MD5 checksum, prevents duplicates from being validated and stored multiple times.
Before Zeticon's information platform went live, there was no control around duplicates at GS1. However, it is possible that the same asset applies to different trade items ( e.g. An assortment photo, manual, etc.). This used to mean that we would validate and store the same asset multiple times under each trade item. With the Zeticon application, we are now able to identify the same photo and avoid doing it again. This way, we link the same asset to multiple items and save on storage capacity and processing power for validation.
- Full integration with My Product Manager solution
Thanks to Zeticon's open-rest API, full integration is provided with GS1's My Product Manager solution. Thanks to this integration, GS1's customers do not feel that they have to log into another platform to upload or manage digital assets. Thus, the user experience remains the same for GS1's customers, but the platform is enhanced in the background by Zeticon's information platform.The seamless integration also ensures a high degree of automation. Moreover, the integration enables it to perform quality checks on the charged digital assets. Indeed, GS1 can check whether the images conform to the agreed standards such as quality, size, etc.
- Efficient transfer of externally saved files
A key use case from GS1 was the demand for the provision of a Public URL. One of the key requirement of GS1 was to make the transfer of externally stored information as efficient as possible. After all, some suppliers already have images available on certain platforms such as websites, for example. Here, the customer absolutely wanted to avoid My Product Manager, who receives the information forwarded from customers, having to temporarily store files/media himself. To facilitate this, there was a need for an input process whereby Zeticon's underlying platform could start retrieving the files directly via a publicly available URL. To this end, Zeticon has configured and implemented a custom ingest functionality to support uploading assets with an external public URL. In this way, the supplier no longer needs to manually upload the digital asset yet, but does so entirely via the public URL. Moreover, there is an additional check on the integrity of the file, , which was a major challenge for GS1 in the past.
5. A future-proof platform that grows with our customer needs
Even now that GS1 has been fully launched with Zeticon's information platform for some time, coordination moments are still provided on a regular basis to keep abreast of developments on both sides. This sustainable project approach ensures that the platform can grow along with the customer. During these meetings, Zeticon's product owner explains the platform's roadmap and vision, and GS1 provides feedback on their future needs and requirements. In this way, we reinforce the sustainable partnership.