Industry-wide Inter-organizational Systems and Data Quality: Exploratory findings of the use of GS1 standards in the Dutch retail market

Standards in general promise more efficiency and effectiveness in doing (electronic) business. Lowering the costs of collaboration, achieving these gains depends of the development and adoption of the standard in its business environment. Several studies report on research on electronic data interchange (EDI) and its added value to interorganisational collaboration. EDI messages have the purpose to enable organizations to exchange electronically supplier and purchase related content e.g. procurement orders. There is lack of research about product information sharing in business-to-business relationships. A total of 22 cases (organizations) in the Dutch FMCG supply chain were conducted in order to get an industry wide overview on product information sharing. Our cases revealed that data quality is crucial for collaboration success, and that much is to be improved upon. Secondly, the creation of a feedback-loop mechanism is suggested.