Retailer Solutions

"Click here for Customer Case Study: London Drugs"

Supply Chain Automation for Retailers

Retailers have spent countless hours and dollars trying to convince their suppliers to send Invoices electronically to them. Retailers first step in the process was to force “EDI” on to their suppliers.

For the largest suppliers, who had the resources to implement an EDI solution, the request to EDI was grudgingly accepted. For many small suppliers (some estimates are 80% of all suppliers), the cost of implementing EDI was just too high for them.

These suppliers are comfortable using fax to receive P.O.’s but they want a first step to easily create Invoices electronically to mollify their important retail client.

Additionally they want to have the ability to track the status of their Invoices sent to their retail client. For the retailer, the ROI savings that they estimated when they implemented EDI were all based on 100% compliance of their suppliers to EDI.

With only a small portion of their clients sending documents electronically, little or no direct savings have been achieved. Additionally they want to consolidate the sending of Purchase Orders through one process and reduce the constant calls from suppliers inquiring about when they will be paid for their goods.

The Solution - OpenEC® Retail*Trade

The OpenEC® Retail*Trade solution uses OpenEC® Trade Manager, TradeLink  and Trade Web Application Manager to create a fully configurable trading partner business document management solution which allows a retailer to communicate to their suppliers electronically [DA1] no matter what their technical sophistication. It moves business documents (such as Purchase Orders) from a company’s back-end ERP system and transmits them to their trading partners in the format that they can utilize them. It also receives business documents (such as Invoices) from their trading partners and integrates them into their back-end ERP system.

The Benefits

Implementation of the OpenEC® Retail*Trade provides the ability to:

• Present a solution for all of your 100% of the supply chain no matter what their technical sophistication
• Significantly reduce accounts payable data entry costs by electronically receiving Invoices
• Improve vendor service by providing  24 X 7 online access to critical business information
• Reduce Purchase Order/Invoice reconciliation time and costs
• Improved audit of all business document transfers
• Leverage existing electronic interfaces for communicating with all suppliers