Wholesaler and importer
Conaxess Trade Denmark is a wholesaler and importer of a wide range of well-known goods, such as WASA, Heinz, Nupo, Barcardi and many more. They currently have 1,900 active item numbers divided into the categories Food, Food Service, Non-Food, Confectionery, Travel Retail and Beverage.

More systems produce more errors
For entering product information, Conaxess Trade Danmark operated with several IT systems. This led to a number of double entries, as data had to be entered both in their own systems, at GS1 and finally in the customers' systems. The manual entry into at least three different systems made the quality of the entered data a challenge.

The decision
Conaxess Trade Danmark set up a group managed by Nina Egebøl, Senior Key Account Manager Coordinator and Thomas Hammelev-Wethje, Project Manager. The task was to investigate the upcoming challenges in connection with compliance with the regulation EU 1169 and at the same time improve the quality of product data. The group quickly found that the choice was between building a solution themselves or choosing fmcgProducts from fmcg solutions. Nina and Thomas decided that fmcg solutions should be the supplier.

"After we had made the decision, a great deal of work began to review each individual field for product information and define requirements for the individual fields. When we were finished, fmcg solutions was given the field descriptions and the solution, as well as the layout, were then adapted to our wishes and needs," says Thomas Hammelev-Wethje.

1900 approvals in four weeks
Prior to an intensive work period of four weeks integrating and migrating data, Conaxess had prepared data by extracting data from its own IT systems. Three months of internal preparation and intensive quality work resulted in Conaxess Trade Denmark achieving their goal of getting 1,900 item numbers approved by GS1 in four weeks. "The error messages - both in connection with enrichment and when uploading product data to GS1 - were a very big strength of fmcgProducts and a significant factor in achieving that we reached the deadline," says Nina Egebøl from Conaxess Trade Denmark. In fmcgProducts, errors in the product are marked with a red star and an explanatory help text. All input errors reported by GS1 are automatically collected in an error list generated by fmcgProducts, which makes troubleshooting and correction easier and more manageable.

No thanks to manual entry
Conaxess Trade Danmark today has a solution where product and master data creation takes place from its own ERP system. Information from ERP is imported into fmcgProducts, from where data is enriched. From fmcgProducts, product data is synchronized to GS1. Conaxess Trade Danmark has therefore today minimized the number of systems and streamlined the entire chain. fmcgProducts enables the entire organization to access and retrieve data or product sheets.

"At Conaxess, several people in the company have been given access to retrieve data and information. In addition, we are opening up the product managers so that they can look up product data themselves in fmcgProducts and forward product brochures - this way they become more self-driving. The next goal is for all products to be associated with product images, so that Conaxess Trade's customers can have direct access to product images," says Thomas Hammelev-Wethje.

When asked what they should have done if fmcgProducts had not been an option, Thomas Hammelev-Wethje says that manual entry or own development of integration with Trade Sync had been mentioned as a possible long-winded and very inappropriate solution.