ALEXANDRIA, Va. – The Petroleum Convenience Alliance for Technology Standards (PCATS) and 1SYNC announced the successful conclusion of the PCATS Gateway pilot program. Powered by 1SYNC and sponsored by NACS, the pilot program began in February and concluded in April. PCATS announced the results of the pilot yesterday at NACStech 2007.
The PCATS Gateway is a secure communications pipeline enabling trading partners in the convenience and petroleum channel to synchronize an item’s price and promotion information using the standard PCATS-NAXML format to populate their price book electronically. PCATS-NAXML has been designed by the PCATS EB2B Retail Working Group to be a low-cost, effective and simple industry format for electronic business documents.
“The objective for the pilot was to assist trading partners in achieving supply chain benefits associated with electronic price book synchronization, and the best way to achieve that was by partnering with PCATS with the sponsorship of NACS,” Bob Noe, CEO of 1SYNC, said in a press release. “We are extremely pleased that the positive results of the pilot confirm our expectations that the Gateway is a cost-effective method for convenience and petroleum retailers to synchronize data with their suppliers. We believe that the PCATS Gateway will expand and accelerate the commercial value of data synchronization in the convenience channel.”
The pilot consisted of five retailer participants ranging in store count from six stores to more than 1,500 stores, and six supplier participants including three multi-national suppliers and three regional or local suppliers. Retailer participants include: Clinard Oil Co. Inc., E-Z Mart Stores Inc., Nice N Easy Grocery Shoppes Inc., The Pantry Inc. and Town and Country Food Stores. Supplier participants included Arctic Glacier Ice, Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages, Frito-Lay, Panhandle Popcorn Co., and The Coca-Cola Company. CMI Solutions (CMI) and PDI were the solution providers who assisted their retail customers with connecting and integrating the transmitted data into the retailer’s price book.
“The 1SYNC pilot project was something that the industry has been clamoring for years to be developed and is something that is long overdue for the convenience store industry," said Matt Paduano, vice president of information for Nice N Easy, in the press release. "This process will allow even the smallest retailer and the smallest vendors to share electronic data without a huge investment in hardware, software, or technical expertise. The pilot went well with the two vendors that we tested with and it integrated into our system seamlessly,” he said.
“Panhandle Popcorn Co. is a small business and I was uncertain as to the complexity of the pilot program,” said Jim Mock, president of Panhandle Popcorn. “However, I found the whole process to be informative and not as challenging as expected. This is the next best thing to keying in my information directly into my retailer’s system. For a small, regional company such as ours, the Gateway proved to be very easy to use.”
“PCATS is excited that the Pilot program achieved all of its objectives,” said John Hervey, PCATS executive director. “We look forward to working with 1SYNC in the future and expect to have a rollout announcement for the industry soon.”