FEST European Master Data Guideline – Press Conference

Wednesday 2nd June 2021 at 11H00 CET

The European Federation for the Sanitary and Heating Wholesale Trade (FEST) are hosting a virtual Press Launch for the new European Master Data Guideline that will help to revolutionise the way the industry transacts in the future. An introduction will be given by FEST President Johan Stevens, and questions will be taken by Magnus Sirén Director of TALTEKA and master data project leader, and Marc Habets technical director of ETIM International.

The main purpose of the EMDG is to unambiguously define – and uniquely identify – the general master data attributes for products. This long-overdue data guideline has been developed by industry experts to facilitate the method in which basic product data is transferred between manufacturers and wholesalers. The continuous improvement of the quality of electronic product data is a base requirement for all process optimisation and constitutes the basis of digitalisation in all fields of business. Achieving a higher product data quality is the common goal of all parties in the whole supply chain, involving all industry stakeholders.
This guideline is initially intended for the HVAC and plumbing industry, with the intention to extend it to other industries in the future. To further optimise electronic data exchange and the quality of product master data in the future, existing standards and regulations have been harmonised, thus providing an unambiguous understanding of the content for both the sender and receiver.
As a first step, the FEST EMDG is intended to be the common framework to which different systems can be mapped in order to communicate correctly with each other. Later on, the EMDG
should become the common standard within the different systems, that will totally improve data communication.

The guideline itself provides a detailed overview of the data contents of the FEST EMDG. However, it should be noted that the EMDG is only the guideline and basis for defining the data
attributes, it does not describe any particular exchange format between software systems. It constitutes the common basis for the product data contents for all different exchange formats, so
the guideline is applicable to all types of transfer methods from Excel, or XML to API, etc.