Home Depot Pushes Adoption Of UCCnetHome Depot Pushes Adoption Of UCCnet

Suppliers to Home Depot Inc. must adopt UCCnet product-registry standards by the second half of next year, when the home-improvement retailer expects to stop using manual means of exchanging product data with them.

UCCnet, part of the Uniform Code Council, is a global online registry of product information that manufacturers and retailers use to improve electronic-data sharing for ordering, billing, and inventory management. Using the registry and XML-based online data synchronization, suppliers and retailers can reduce order and invoice errors, improve inventory management and demand forecasting, and get products on store shelves quicker, says Mark Healy, merchandise operations senior director at Home Depot.

Healy won't say that Home Depot will stop doing business with suppliers that don't use the UCCnet registry. "But we're going to shut off the manual process and go with an all-electronic solution," he says, citing the third or fourth quarter of 2005 as the target time frame. "If the supplier doesn't have an electronic solution, it's going to be difficult for them to get information to us."

Home Depot is asking suppliers to review their internal systems and prepare their product data for UCCnet. In this year's third quarter, the retailer will provide a schedule for when it expects vendors in specific product categories to be using UCCnet. Recently, Home Depot named five vendors as "preferred data-synchronization partners" for UCCnet-related software and services: bTrade, the Electronic Commerce Council of Canada, Lansa, Sterling Commerce, and Transora.

The number of suppliers and retailers that have signed up to participate in UCCnet has grown steadily and last week stood at 2,775, Healy says, and about 1,000 of Home Depot's 5,000-plus suppliers are among them.