Improving “product master data” — which is used to communicate essential information on commodities — is critical to strengthening global health supply chains. To this end, the USAID Global Health Supply Chain Program-Procurement and Supply Management (GHSC-PSM) project is leveraging the the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) to synchronize master data with health commodity suppliers by December 2019. The GDSN supports real-time data sharing and trade-item updates among trading partners, which facilitates product data exchange between companies and consumers, driving business and efficiencies for all partners in the network, all around the world.
In October, IDA Foundation, through a partnership with GS1 Netherlands, was the first member the GHSC-PSM supplier community to subscribe to the GDSN for the purpose of synchronizing data with the project. This event is an exciting milestone, in particular because of the complexities of sharing master data between manufacturers, wholesalers, and global procurement agencies due to the vast number of stakeholders, relationships, and products in scope.
In this first phase, IDA and GHSC-PSM successfully synchronized data for three items — two essential medicines and one antimalarial — and were able to provide information for all mandatory and required data attributes. This provides GHSC-PSM with critical master data to support operational supply chain functions through, for example, providing volumetric data at each level of the packaging hierarchy to enable transport load optimization. Through this platform, IDA will also able to provide GHSC-PSM with marketing authorization data for products being supplied to USAID-supported countries to support strategic decision making around order allocation and fulfillment.
