As one year closes and a new year begins we wanted to take a moment to look back at 2017 and share our thoughts and findings with you.

2017 saw continued uncertainty around Brexit, shake-ups and consolidation within the food industry as Tesco and Booker announced a merger, the Co-op acquired Nisa and the news of P&H entering administration. A little closer to home, it was another strong, year of growth for Erudus.

Over the course of 2017, we doubled the number of wholesalers using the platform finishing the year with a total of 96, with Trevors Foodservice the last wholesaler to onboard before the year was out. View the full list of wholesalers using Erudus here.

Making Progress

2017 was a year of significant progress, across many key areas. We released many new features which aided improvements in data quality, performance and functionality.

Heres our top 3 features for improved functionality in 2017

Manufacturers can now send specifications to non-erudus users right from within Erudus at a click of a button. The recipient receives an email containing a link to view the specification online.

Wholesalers can now assign multiple local codes to the same product by separating each code with a comma; feedback suggests this has helped wholesalers in managing large chain accounts.

Product Code Release notifications. Wholesale admin users now receive an email notification when a manufacturer delists a product where a wholesaler has a local code assigned.

API, Our Biggest Achievement of 2017

Our biggest achievement in 2017 was the release of the ‘Wholesaler/Demand-User API’ which has enabled wholesalers to extract manufacturers’ content directly into their systems (machine to machine) providing an effective and efficient method of obtaining and maintaining product master data in large volumes.

We’ve seen a number of Wholesalers successfully implement an API feed during 2017, with over 2 million API calls having been made, (not bad given most wholesalers didn’t implement their API feeds until halfway through the year). This is one area we feel will grow in 2018 and beyond as the importance of ‘product master data’ continues to climb up Wholesalers’ agendas.Erudus API Program

Special mention to Hyperama Wholesale as the first wholesaler to implement an API feed from Erudus. The team at Hyperama provided us with some great feedback and suggestions to enhance the API’s usability. Thank you, Peter and Tariq.

Not sure what an API is? Then take a look at our ‘What is the Erudus API’ article for more information.

Nielsen Brandbank Partnership

We announced in October our partnership with Nielsen Brandbank which will sharply increase the number of product specifications available to users within Erudus. The industry positively received the announcement with early feedback being very encouraging from both wholesalers and manufacturers alike.

We’ve worked hard on incorporating the Nielsen Brandbank data into Erudus throughout autumn 2017 and we’re extremely excited to see our efforts coming to fruition for early 2018. Not only will existing members benefit but we hope Wholesalers yet to commit will be persuaded by the greater product coverage.

Both Erudus and Nielsen Brandbank want to gain a deeper understanding of everyone’s data requirements in 2018 to ensure we capture the right data for future data models i.e. the product attributes you’re asked to complete by customers.

You can contribute to this by sharing your new line form (wholesalers) or in-house product specification (brands/manufacturers) with us to ensure it’s captured by our newly created steering group, that will look at data requirements across the industry in greater detail.

Please send your new line forms/product specifications to industryfeedback@erudus.com

2017: Interesting Statistics

• User base goes international! – Manufacturers from 33 countries around the world are consistently using Erudus to share their product specifications with UK Wholesale/Foodservice companies.
• Caterers are turning to iPad’s as their favoured device, 33% of all visits to the various Erudus solutions in 2017 were from iPad’s, closely followed by the iPhone which accounted for an additional 27%.
• And finally, for the 3rd year running Cranberry Sauce claims top spot as the most searched for product in the run-up to Christmas (1st Nov – 20th Dec).