GCI Voluntary Guideline on GDS

GCI Voluntary Guideline on Global Data Synchronisation

The Global Commerce Initiative has published the Voluntary Guideline on Global Data Synchronisation (GDS) and is asking CEOs to sign the document to underline their companies' commitment.

As pointed out by the GCI Co-chairs, Antony Burgmans (Unilever) and Lee Scott (Wal-Mart) in a letter to the GCI Executive Board Members, this guideline will help the industry to commit to the GDS vision and its implementation by ensuring a common understanding of relevant rules and principles.

This is one of the cornerstones of efficient trading relationships. The guideline covers such principles as:

• no deviation from published Global Standards;
• free choice of home data pool;
• payment of data pool subscriptions only to home data pools (not to business partners' data pools);
• no interconnect fees to connect to other data pools;
• full confidentiality and security assurance for exchange of relationship-dependent data (e.g. price)

The guideline has undergone a legal check and has been declared compatible with anti-trust legislation around the world. It is voluntary and not legally binding.

The Chief Executive Officers of the following companies have already signed the Guideline:

The J.M. Smucker Company
Kraft Foods
Johnson&Johnson
Masterfoods
Nestlé
Sara Lee International
Unilever

as well as

METRO Group
Pick'n Pay
Royal Ahold
Tesco
Wal*Mart

Please invite your company's CEO to consider signing the document as evidence of your company's commitment to implement the GDS vision.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Sabine Ritter at Sabine.Ritter@gci-net.org

The coverletter together with the Guideline can be viewed and downloaded by clicking at the files below.

Voluntary Guideline on GDS

Voluntary Guideline on GDS, December 2005 (95KB)

VoluntaryGDSGuidelineonGDS-final-dec-05.doc

Coverletter (71KB)

CoverletterGDSGuideline.doc