Over a year ago on this blog I posted information about the rate at which new data was being produced each year. It involved the plethoric number of iPods it would take to hold the year’s data – a number which would have filled a similarly excessive number of football stadiums with said iPods. The point is that this is the language we have begun to use when discussing the ever-increasing amount of data generated by humans and machines each year.
Well here’s a new one: according to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, quoted in a recent CGT Magazine article, the company now creates 5 exabytes of data every three days. To trump the iPod-football stadium illustrations of yesteryear, 5 exabytes is the amount of information created from the beginning of time through 1978. Read more…
The business practices of the massive retailer Wal-Mart are both praised and hated by different members of the CPG community. The main tenet of those practices has been lowering Wal-Mart’s costs, thereby allowing them to pass the savings onto the consumer, offering the lowest price in the market for a given product. One of Wal-Mart’s classic avenues for cutting costs on their own end is to reach back into their supply chain to identify what operations can be taken on by the company rather than outsourced. The retailer did this most prominently with the distribution of their demand data. When Wal-Mart pulled out of common practice of providing their data to large scale content providers such as IRI, they began to provide that data, via Retail Link, straight to the producers who stocked their shelves. In doing so Wal-Mart cut out the middleman, in this case the data content providers, both saving on costs and taking complete control of how and to whom their data was distributed.
A recent article posted online from Bloomberg Businessweek shows Wal-Mart employing similar tactics in regard to the transportation of their suppliers’ products. Read more…
The sheer amount of compounding demand information being created on a daily, weekly and yearly basis is causing a shift in the way CPG companies need to approach data capture and governance. Entirely new tools are becoming not only helpful, but necessary. This phenomenon could not be displayed more clearly than it was in a recent article posted on the home page of MarketWatch discussing the sharp rise in use of the Demand Signal Repository, or DSR. Read more…
Information Management posted an article on its website recently in which a data management consulting expert delineated what she thought necessary, at the onset, to implement a data management system within a company. Written by a partner at a respectable consulting firm (Jane Griffin for Deloitte Consulting LLP), the article is titled “Implementing a Data Governance Initiative,” and in the interest of having a diverse array of input on such implementation, here are the components she sees as necessary for efficient data management: Read more…