What is the Product Catalog and its value to you?

Some cooperatives in North America offer branded online store services to their retail members. Crop protection and Seed manufacturers want to ensure that such online stores have complete, accurate and up-to-date information in their Product Catalog.

Improve the Customer Experience

•Empowers customers to make better informed decisions and gives them the confidence they are buying the product they want.

•Makes it easier for customers to search for products and place an online order.

•Enables the delivery of a rich and consistent experience to your customers

Omnichannel Experience

•Customers expect a similar experience from multiple sources including E-commerce, Website, Mobile Apps, and Digital Ag Solutions.

Improve Staff Productivity

•Reduction in the time and cost involved for Marketing and E-commerce teams to manually maintain product information at an increasing scale across manufacturers.

Latest Version (LTS) JSON Schema

The JSON Schema is the ‘normative form’ delivered by AgGateway, to allow a transport independent means to communicate the format and meaning of the JSON payload. The latest version of the Product Catalog JSON Schema is located in GitHub, and is Version 2.1. You must be a member of AgGateway to access the GitHub Repo.

https://github.com/AgGateway/ProductCatalog

Please refer to the description and example keywords in the JSON Schema for property definitions.

Solution Architecture for Partner Consideration

AgGateway members of the Product Catalog work group have provided assets that will help accelerate the engagement and on-boarding, including Database definition language (DDL) for useable staging tables, and the mapping specification to/from the API definition related to these tables. We recognize that the manufacturers may have more than one back-office application from which this data is sourced from, including an ERP, Product Lifecycle Management System, and a Marketing application (perhaps a Product Information Management system). This will vary by manufacturer, but the general solution architecture will likely be the same.

The recipient of the catalog such as a distributor may have an e-Commerce platform as well as a platform for research and development for product selection and distribution setup.

Open

Open API Definition

While not the normative form, the OpenAPI definition provides the RESTful Web API approach to retrieve or send the the Product Catalog information. It is also generated out of the Score tool.

The OpenAPI definition is available in the GitHub repository, and provides POST and GET operations for implementers. A PUT operation for updates can be added in the future.

DDL for Staging Tables

The Database Definition Language (DDL) files to stage the catalog data is provided as an accelerated for both manufacturers, distributors, and retailers hold the data prior to final load into the base tables of an ERP application. This becomes highly valuable for manufacturers when data must be sourced from multiple back-end systems. Similarly there is value to recipients of the catalog data, to understand if certain products should be distributed and so forth.

You must be a member of AgGateway to be able have access to these staging tables. The value to the implementers is a typically 3-4 weeks of data modeling exercise using high valued modeling resources with experience with these tools.

Mapping Spreadsheet

The mapping spreadsheet ties the OpenAPI definition and the DDL together. It defines where to populate the data from either the staging tables to the OpenAPI schema definition, or vice versa, from the OpenAPI definition to the stage tables for recipients of the data. This in Excel form today.

Data Dictionary

The columns and definitions of the data dictionary are as follows:

Controlled Vocabularies

The following controlled vocabularies (i.e., code lists) are used in the schema.