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Signify and GS1, Ready to go

· 3 min read

Philips Lighting (Signify) is one of the world's leading manufacturers of LED lighting. For more than 125 years, Signify has been at the forefront of lighting innovation and quality. Signify is the world market leader in connected LED lighting systems, software and services.

Good article data is crucial

Consumers are increasingly orientating and buying online. Good product information is of crucial importance in this respect. Leading retailers such as Intergamma, Maxeda and Hubo.be have therefore taken the step to GS1 and are asking suppliers to provide product information to the GS1 data pool.

From “own” language to sector language

This is often where the major struggles with suppliers begin. In internal systems, the supplier has assigned its own product specifications and values ​​to its articles (article data).

The goal is to convert this into industry-generic product specifications and values ​​(universal article data). Manually converting and updating internal article data to a standard language is time-consuming and error-prone. Qmica has been developed to prevent this.

Qmica automates and facilitates the efficient exchange of product information in certain standard languages, such as GS1. Qmica is a mapping tool that converts “own” language to standard language. Both attributes and values ​​can be converted.

How can it be done quickly and efficiently, without problems

For example, Signify (Philips Lighting) has achieved enormous time savings with the help of Qmica when connecting to the GS1 data pool.

Gunther Thans, Marketing Operations Manager at Signify, is positive about the way in which Qmica has been deployed and the time savings achieved:

“The transition to online has accelerated the need for standardization of data for the consumer market. The DIY sector has many different data standards and input templates. This makes it complex for suppliers to get data to customers in a good way.

With the help of Qmica we have translated our data to the GS1 data standard.

If you realize that we have about 2,500 products, each with an average of 70 attributes, then you understand how complex and time-consuming it is to enter that manually. That is why we immediately started with Qmica. I can now say that partly because of this we have shortened the lead time of this project by half.

In Qmica you can enter data and specify the translation per data element. Suppose dark blue should become blue, then you only have to enter it once. The software adjusts it automatically for all products.

The big advantage for the future is that we now have all datasets ready. This makes introducing new products simple. We only need a few clicks to have a new product validated and exported. We no longer have to go through the entire standard per product, but are ready to go.”

Data quality

Intergamma notes that the implementation process at Signify went much faster than at suppliers who do not yet use Qmica.

The data quality has also increased considerably as a result. Which ultimately leads to more satisfaction and sales for the consumer, the supplier and the retailer.

Jacco Kapitein from Qmica adds: Our solution fills the gap between “own” language and standard language. We maintain the included standards, so that the supplier does not have to do this in his own systems.

In addition, Qmica provides the correct export to the correct channel after conversion. With Qmica, suppliers are able to speak sector language quickly and efficiently without having to maintain all kinds of manual and error-prone processes.