SAN DIEGO- August 15, 2006 – Today, the company introduced enhancements to its flagship eDataFlex™ Pricing Service product. The eDataFlex family of products provides pricing and product information in flexible formats that integrate with all the major business system software packages.

For users of the Unified Tab Delimited (UTD) format, a new data field has been added that delivers a fifth level of structure to the commodity code tree. Additionally, the company has expanded the number of codes in use so that the new structure is much more granular in nature than the previous 4-level structure. This enhancement was based on feedback that a more granular structure was needed to accommodate better searching, better product categorization, and for building e-commerce drilldown tree structures.

Users of the fixed field format (PFMS / Price File Maintenance Service®) will still receive the 4-level commodity structure, but because many new codes have been added, customers will still receive the benefit of the improved granularity of the commodity tree.

The scope of the 1st phase of this project included making the 3000, 4000, and 2300 series of the structure more granular, as these series contain close to 70% of the database (over 800,000 items).

Trade Service is also pleased to announce that they have expanded the UTD field set to include fields that enable distributors to take advantage of cutting edge use models like automated shipping cost calculation, and the optimization of warehouse space, delivery truck loading, and product palletization.

Fields added include pkg_indicator, pkg_weight, pkg_weight_uom, ps_uom, ps_uom_qty, pkg_type, pkg_qty, pkg_uom, indv_weight and indv_weight_uom. Each of these fields is fully described in the new technical specification.