How the Electrical Industry could save Millions and sell more product.

There's a major shift underway on the internet, it won't happen overnight, but an industry like the Electrical Wholesale Industry could benefit almost immediately from jumping on the bandwagon.

The shift is thought of as the Semantic Web and loosely refers to an Industry change from PUSHING information to its consumers to consumers PULLING information that's important to them.

What does this mean?  Consider these non-industry examples.  

Have you ever lost a word, excel, or powerpoint FILE on your computer?  

Spent a lot of time looking for it?

Do you spend the same amount of time looking for word, excel, or powerpoint?  

Which is more important?  The application (word, excel, ppt) or the file (data)?

When we do find our file, do you spend time trying to figure out if its the latest version?  

Is someone else working on another version that needs to be merged?

This is our world today and it is not so commonly known as the world of PUSH.  

The world of PUSH costs the Electrical Industry millions every year in lost sales and efficiency.

So what does a PULL world look like?

Well, the opposite.  Consider these examples.

What if our files existed in one place, and only one place, and never moved?

What if our files were edited by everybody in place?  

Would we ever look for it again or worry about versioning?

What if everybody could PULL the file from a singular location as they needed it?

This is the shift slowly occurring on the web and if you are wondering, the "Cloud" is an example of a shift towards the PULL world.

So what does this have to do with the Electrical Industry?

Here's a broader industry example.

Suppose I want to find out all that I could about a 431-SLT.  Let's go even further, suppose I want a distributor's business system, any consumer electrical application on an iphone, android phone, ipad, or any e-commerce website selling a 431-SLT to quickly find all they need to find about a 431-SLT, instantly.

The "data" detailing a 431-SLT is the "file" & the medium with which I'm accessing the data is the application as compared to our example above.  

In today's PUSH world, there are a number of different places I can go to find this information.   The manufacturers catalog, Tradeservice, IDEA, IDW, Material Express, or a search engine.  In the "PUSH" world, the information is being pushed out to many places and the consumer has to go searching for it.

In the PULL world, the 431-SLT would reside in an industry standard location (web) and be semantically tagged (machine readable data attributes) so that when eyeballs were looking for it on the web, or a web crawler came along from a search engine, or a business system API reached out, or a mobile phone app was looking for the data, it could be quickly and easily found in one master location and pulled into whatever device or medium was looking for it.  This is the world of PULL.

As it happens, the manufacturer of the 431-SLT is on the right track with this link (431-SLT) but here are the problems, in it's current form.  

1. It's not semantically tagged (machine readable) or in other words, a computer crawling the page cannot determine the content or meaning of the page, it will simply see text and try to index it.

2.  Will this URL exist tomorrow? next month? next year?  Will they change the URL path to the item? Change the category? change the group?  Chances are the IT department will change the link, move the data, or something will happen and we'll be searching for it again.

So to be truly PULL the 431-SLT link would need the following.

1. The URL or Location where this product is found can never change going forward, it needs to live in an industry standard place (URL).  

An example for this item might be    http://www.electricalindustry.com/bridgeport/431-SLT   vs.

http://www.bptfittings.com/Catalog/ProductSpecification.aspx?CategoryId=10&FamilyId=259&ProductId=431-SLT  

Notice that the URL for the 431-SLT, as it exists today, walks through a typical catalog hierarchy CategoryId=10 FamilyId=259 ProductId=431-SLT.  So to "link" to a product page for this manufacturer, one would have to know the manufacturer category id's and product id's in order to link to the item.  

Here are two other examples that simply require knowing the product id in order to link to them;  

RAB Lighting - http://www.rabweb.com/product_detail.php?product=TPPB

Thomas & Betts - http://www.tnb.com/ps/fulltilt/index.cgi?part=DX-1

To properly link from anywhere or PULL information from these two manufacturers simply requires knowledge of the parent URL path and the item.  Cheers to TnB, RAB, and Bridgeport (their site is evolving quickly)!!

2. The data needs to be marked up using a semantic ontology so that a machine knows, as a human would, exactly what the page is detailing.  See GoodRelations

Marked up properly, this page could tell a web crawler for Google that the page is an ITEM page, MANUFACTURED by Bridgeport, and potentially SOLD by Distributor A, B, C, etc..

3. Semantic markup of this item needs to follow a conventional industry data structure.  Maybe it's adopting GoodRelations or modifying it slightly for the industry.  Regardless, business systems could rely on information being within certain tags and in certain formats.

With these 3 things, manufacturers could spend their time keeping the item up to date and all requests for their data could go away, saving them a tremendous amount of time and money on compiling and sending out their data.  Once in this format, distributors, online sellers, consumers, and business system manufacturers could all reliably and simply link to or pull the data from a singular location using it for their individual needs.  

Search engines could then index this single location as THE definitive search result when someone searches for a 431-SLT, creating an opportunity for the manufacturer to link out to the distributor channel that sells the product for them.

This isn't about Technology rendering some part of the electrical industry irrelevant, this is an opportunity for the electrical industry to transform itself, reduce inefficiencies, increase sales, and truly take advantage of what the web holds for it.

Having held this vision for the electrical industry for some time, it wasn't until I read and borrowed some structure and examples from the book PULL that I decided to write this post.  It's not a night-time read but picking it up and reading through it is worth every minute if you want to dig deeper into the world of PULL and how it is evolving across several industries.