"It's an international problem!" what I called out in out latest meeting with one of our existing customer. I later realized that this was the sub-conscious analysis of my brain.
Matchmaking was never an easy job for people in real life across the globe and so has been the case for new age buyers and sellers. International standards for products and services have been in place for a while now to assign Commodity Codes for every single item that can be transacted between a buyer and seller. Finding the right commodity code for most common items in different industries is a huge problem than generally assumed to be. Any international standard after a certain extent gives away the regional benefit of common/layman terminologies used for some very basic source items for different industries.
There exits a huge chunk of working population that are so familiar with the regional terminologies that they often end up selecting different unique identification codes for the same Apple they want to buy/sell. I think this is a lacuna in the modernization technique applied by the commodity classification bodies. These bodies should be looking to tap the potential of regional terminologies while maintaining a relationship with the unique identification standards.
Like we can tag our blogs, discussions, topics etc. the international standards for classifications should build tags for each unique commodity code. Off-course its easier said than done but the ERP systems can first allow such a concept and then the data collected on the basis of ground level transactions at lowest level of regional hierarchy can form the building blocks.
