Automation
OPENING GENERAL SESSION
October 25, 10:25 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. CDT Industry Tech and innovation Panel
Chistina Wegner Co-Chair
FEDA Data Governance and Standards Committee Vice President of Marketing The Vollrath Company
In addition to helping businesses bridge the labor gap, automating the right tasks and processes can unlock more efficiency and productivity that ultimately save money and result in higher profits for a business. But standardization is critical for the ability to automate processes. Automating product pricing updates, a product data aspect that changes with greater frequency, for example, can save dealers hundreds of hours of staff time.
At Restaurant Equipment
James K. Pool III Chief Technology and Operations Officer Middleby Corp
Brad Pierce Moderator Co-Chair
FEDA Data Governance and Standards Committee President
Restaurant Equipment World
22 FEDA News & Views
World, the uniformly formatted and rich product data from the FEDA Data Portal, an industry database for product information, has allowed the company to automate price updates into its ERP and POS systems. Because the portal acts as a single, central location for standardized product data, it has become faster, less labor intensive and more precise for Restaurant Equipment World to update pricing on its e-commerce website and cash-and-carry point of sale system. When a manufacturer updates a product’s price in the FEDA Data Portal, the change is immediately visible to dealers, allowing them to run campaigns consecutively with manufacturers and to sell products at current pricing. It eliminates the lag that can occur between when
a manufacturer alters pricing and the dealer adjusts it, thus retaining profitability.
Electronic Data
Interchange (EDI) Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is another technological advancement that can help speed up delivery of services and products. At the same time, it can make businesses leaner and more efficient while reducing errors stemming from human input. All this leads to more satisfied customers. Businesses can utilize electronic communication to automate data-intensive manual tasks such as purchase order placement, confirmations, ship notices, delivery date changes, invoices and others. For Pierce, EDI is “a game- changer for businesses,” as it allows company staff “to focus their time and attention on profitable activities.”
EDI uses structured
standard formats such as ANSI, EDIFACT,
TRADACOMS and ebXML, however, the data that feeds into the documents should also be consistent and without ambiguity. This is one of the goals of the FEDA Data Portal. As Pierce notes, “Uniform data standards are critical for accurate, efficient and reliable electronic interchange capabilities between channel partners… so that each stakeholder’s
systems are sending and receiving data blocks with known formats, which can then be transferred to appropriate internal systems.”
Technology Stacks Business technology systems
have only gotten more complicated as they become more robust and accessible. It can be difficult to maintain and sync all the tools, programming languages, servers, and databases powering modern apps and platforms, but technology stacks offer a dynamic solution to the problem. Wegner believes tech stack innovation “is a massive area for improvement in the industry.” A tech stack is an ordering of technologies and can consist of frontend and backend technologies that determine the kind of applications that a business could develop and the resources that would be needed. Tech stacks depend on the processing of colossal volumes of data and on the technologies’ fit — their capability to work together well. Tech stacks allow businesses to scale faster, purposely and to face fewer application development issues that can hamper growth in the future.
Machine Learning and AI
FE&S businesses are already experimenting with artificial
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