Your Product Data Team Is Solving the Wrong Problem

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A distributor brings on a new supplier line. The file lands, and before a single item can go live, someone on the product data team opens it and starts the same work they do every time.

Match the supplier's categories to the house taxonomy. Fill the attributes that came through thin or blank. Convert the dimensions, fix the fractions, force the units into one format. Weeks later the line is sellable. The supplier's data was “complete” the day it arrived. It just wasn't usable, and the distributor paid to make it so.

That work is a bill. Most distributors have stopped seeing it as one, because it never shows up as a line item. It shows up as headcount, as onboarding time, as the reason a new line takes six weeks to reach the webstore instead of one. So, when ASA talks about requesting product data in the PDS format, the pitch to a distributor isn't “help the standard along.” It's simpler and more self-interested than that.

Stop paying your own team to create data your suppliers could have sent correct.

Ask any product data lead what onboarding a supplier file actually involves and you get the same list. Map the manufacturer's classification to your taxonomy. Normalize the attributes to your schema. Standardize the units of measure, the fractions versus decimals, the proper case. That sequence runs on every file, from every supplier, regardless of what shows up. And a distributor almost never receives a supplier spreadsheet clean enough to import as-is. It gets curated first, every time.

Here is the gap that costs everyone. A manufacturer measures their data by whether it's accurate: is the weight right, the dimension right, the model number correct. By that test, most supplier data passes. A distributor measures the same data by whether it's usable: will it load without a human touching it, will it populate the web filters, can a counter rep find the part on the first search. Those are different tests. The distance between them gets absorbed entirely on the distributor's side, quietly, every time a file comes in.

Put numbers on it. A distributor onboarding a new supplier line of 3,000 SKUs can burn two to three hours per hundred records mapping and enriching before anything is sellable, and that is one line. Multiply it across the new and updated supplier files that arrive over a year, and product enrichment stops being a task and becomes a standing cost: a team whose main job is re-creating information the supplier already had and could have formatted once.

The slower cost is time to sell. A line that needs three weeks of data cleanup is three weeks of not quoting it, not stocking it against demand, not showing it on the webstore. When a contractor searches, doesn't find the part, and buys it from whichever distributor listed it, onboarding speed stops being a back-office metric and becomes revenue timing.

The most expensive cost hides on the webstore. Thin attributes don't just look sparse, they break search. A customer filters for a 1-inch bronze ball valve with threaded ends and gets 340 results, because “End Connection” was never populated as a value the filter could use. The order goes to the distributor whose catalog let that customer narrow to the exact part in three clicks. Rich, standardized attributes are the difference between a webstore that converts and one that hands back a wall of undifferentiated results.

PDS is the shared format that closes the gap at the source. The standard defines the mandatory fields and the values a supplier should deliver, so the file arrives already mapped to something your system can read, already carrying the attributes your webstore needs, already normalized. The manufacturer populates it once. Every distributor who carries the line stops populating it independently. The cost doesn't vanish from the channel. It moves to the one place it can be paid a single time.

This is where distributors have more leverage than they use. Adoption has never been stuck on manufacturers who refuse. The manufacturers on the ASA task group are already running their files against the standard and asking what to fix. What moves a supplier from willing to done is a customer asking for it by name. A distributor that writes “product data delivered in the ASA PDS format” into its supplier onboarding requirements does more for its own data quality than any internal cleanup project, because it stops the bad file before it ever arrives.

ASA built the field set and the format. It didn't build the leverage. That belongs to the distributor who decides the next supplier line will arrive clean or not at all. You are already paying for PDS-quality data. You're paying your own team to make it, one file at a time, after the fact. Requesting it in the standard moves that cost back to the supplier who should have carried it, and the enrichment hours you stop spending are the return on the ask.

By Nils Swenson