During an ASA Strategic Planning Retreat, ASA volunteers discussed the state of the practice when obtaining digital product data from manufacturers to be utilized by distributors.
Manufacturers noted that the quantity, variety and frequency of product data requests is growing at faster rates than pre-pandemic and are challenging to fulfill. Distributors described a predominately manual process of managing as many as 14,000 products from hundreds of manufacturers, often with one or two team members doing the heavy task of processing the data coming in many different formats.