Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, you’ll know that the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is fast approaching.

What is the GDPR?

The Gdpr is the biggest data privacy shake-up in over 20 years and is designed to be more appropriate for the digital age.

It is designed to:

• Give individuals better control of their data
• Ensure organisations comply with data protection regulations

It’s the reason that you’re receiving many emails asking you to confirm that you want to remain subscribed to newsletters and mailing lists. And why you’re sending these emails out to your customers and contacts too.

When does GDPR come into effect?

The General Data Protection Regulation is effective from 25th May 2018, and many Businesses are still determining out how the new law will affect them and their customers. They are working hard to ensure that they and their partners are compliant.

There are plenty of resources online to help you ensure that you comply with GDPR and you shouldn’t just assume that you’ll automatically comply with the General Data Protection Regulation.

Our customers, and their customers, will demand that they are GDPR compliant.

How does this affect Warehousing Businesses?

Understandably the General Data Protection Regulation is a high priority for Warehousing Businesses as they naturally handle a lot of personal information.

Storing information such as customer orders details, billing and delivery addresses and lists of people who subscribe to a newsletter, in accordance with GDPR is extremely important.

B2B Warehousing

B2B warehousing businesses are less affected by GDPR than warehousing businesses.

However as they store contact information for their business customers, they will still need to be compliant.

Ecommerce and Fulfilment Businesses

Ecommerce and fulfilment businesses process lots of individuals’ data including names, delivery addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.

In order to comply with GDPR, this information needs to be:

• Stored securely
• Stored for only a reasonable amount of time
• Retrieved or removed on command

How does Optima store data?

We understand that our clients need to comply with their customers’ requirements, and we’re giving clients the autonomy to manage their (or rather their customers’) data.

We we will send out official documents with more detailed information to our customers in due course.

We have developed tools within Optimiser to anonymise personally identifiable information. This includes delivery details, and can be done either as a one-off or automatically on a regular basis, based on the age of the data (e.g. orders confirmed more than 6 months ago).

These settings can also be administered on a customer basis to ensure our customers are adhering to their customers’ GDPR requirements.

What to do next

Understandably, you’ll appreciate that we’re experts on Warehouse Management Systems, not GDPR. If you need help to ensure that you’re GDPR-Compliant, then we suggest that you get professional advice. The ICO’s ‘Preparing for the GDPR’ may be a good place for you to start.

The post GDPR appeared first on Optima Warehouse Solutions.