We’re not quite sure what’s going to happen with retail in the future and we certainly learned a lot in 2020.  Together we learned about retail, about our businesses, and about our supply chains. We learned about control and that we may not have had as much control over our supply chains as we once thought. The transparency and visibility into our networks were far less than we had imagined, and we learned that while today may look bright and sunny, dark clouds could easily occlude the light.

Regaining Control to Drive Customer Experience

While the retail world scrambles to respond to the ‘new normal’, it is a time to look back at all that happened and analyse if we could have done things differently.  The one positive to emerge from 2020 was the lessons to be learnt from the pandemic’s impact on the retail supply chain. Large-scale disruptions highlighted key areas for retailers to focus on for improving their business models. Modern retailers must now turn the lessons learned into opportunities and as motivators to chart a course to the future.

Many of the opportunities for improvement relate to areas of business where customers are indirectly impacted, such as partner-to-partner alignment and communication as well as processes like transaction management. These behind-the-scenes areas have a broad impact and could greatly benefit from automation, which became apparent during last year.

Streamlining manually intensive processes is another area that could benefit from the lessons learned in 2020. Executing on these opportunities and others serve to free up time, energy, and resources bringing focus on more strategic tasks.

Retailers of today need systems that generate more accurate forecasting, compelling pricing, and efficient sourcing. Enterprises with clear view of their inventories, customers, and business processes will effectively harness these operational advantages to drive greater internal efficiencies and enhance their customer’s experiences.

The Need for Transparency and Visibility

The restrictions placed on businesses great and small as a result of the pandemic led to prioritization of short-term and tactical strategies and short terms fixes such as activating alternative sources and injecting more capital into broken processes to prevent further disruption. These interim solutions to larger issues require additional visibility into the supply chain, which most organizations lack. 

When visibility is limited, demand, inventory, and supply chain data remain dispersed or siloed. While legacy data integration solutions can unify information from different systems, the process involves a lot of time and cost and must be repeated as the business evolves.

A growing number of organizations function on a global scale and deal with widespread and complex supplier networks, which they need to track precisely. In addition, retailers need to address customers’ demands for rapid order fulfilment, curb-side deliveries, and an evolving regulatory landscape when it comes to traceability and transparency.

Today’s retail organizations require a unified supply chain solution that delivers a comprehensive view of the supply chain, is auditable, and includes history and traceability. Organizations have a growing need for end-to-end and in-depth visibility to generate granular data sets, which can then be leveraged to provide actionable intelligence and insight into what the future may hold. Insight leads to better anticipation of supply-side challenges and enable real-time decision-making in the face of challenges, opportunities, and market conditions.

The Modern EDI for Integrated Communication

PartnerLinQ provides a digital supply chain connectivity solution that supports diverse file formats across your trading partner network, while also providing seamless integration between ERP, WMS and TMS platforms and ecommerce platforms, digital marketplaces, B2B portals, and social channels.

It uses intelligent EDI processing and unique field-mapping techniques to automatically reconcile data formats and dramatically reduce onboarding time, allowing customers to derive immediate benefits from a direct communication channel. As an end-to-end supply chain connectivity solution, PartnerLinQ puts you in complete control of your business by providing increased flexibility, full visibility, and deep integration.

PartnerLinQ for Centralized Control and Visibility

PartnerLinQ was designed for rapid implementation, scalability, and flexibility. This makes it the perfect data interchange solution for any organization. It supports both VAN-based and direct-to-partner connections and gives businesses the freedom to choose multiple methods of implementation at the same time and on the same platform.  

A centralized management console allows organizations to easily monitor performance, identify transaction errors and their causes – whether API, CSV, EDI, JSON, XLS, or XML – and generate statistics on the progression of their inbound and outbound transaction sets.

PartnerLinQ can also generate alerts when an event occurs and alert your team to high-priority customer interactions, helping rectify errors the moment they occur and keep key customers satisfied. The strength of a modern business lies in the scale and depth of visibility across its supply chain network. A digitally connected supply chain helps you regain control by leveraging communication across upstream and downstream channels.  PartnerLinQ’s unified supply chain solution brings together partner setups, document exchange configurations, API support, and business rules within one robust platform to enable informed decision-making and mitigate whatever the future may bring.

EDI is the most widely used structured electronic data exchange between organizations. However, not all EDI solutions are created equal. Instead of operating as stand-alone applications that require manual entry and their own maintenance regime, leading EDI platforms integrate seamlessly with ERP software and other business applications to eliminate manual rekeying and duplication of business information.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a powerful cloud-based ERP solution. A fully integrated EDI solution can extend this power by directly connecting your implementation of Dynamics 365 to your trading partners’ ERP systems. Decision makers need to choose an EDI solution that integrates rapidly with Dynamics 365 and takes full advantage of Dynamics 365’s analytics, workflows, and other productivity-enhancing capabilities.

In this blog post, we’ll consider several factors that are important for effectively integrating your EDI solution with Dynamics 365:

The advantage of native integration

Some EDI solutions are designed to natively integrate with Dynamics 365. If you choose the correct one of these solutions, you don’t have to worry about compatibility or security issues – everything just works. This is the best way to avoid compromises or complications during or after solution implementation.

Choose a reliable integration partner and platform

If you decide to implement an EDI solution that isn’t specifically designed to integrate with Dynamics 365, choose an integration partner that possesses in-depth experience with integrating EDI solutions with Microsoft platforms. Since Dynamics 365 runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, your partner of choice should be familiar with Azure-compatible enterprise application integration (EAI) tools and methodologies. To minimize business risk and avoid future upgrade costs, the integration platform should be highly secure and scalable.

Onboarding new EDI trading partners

In addition to the many security and regulatory concerns associated with transmitting sensitive data between organizations, each business that you partner with usually has its own set of information policies and standards. While integrating your EDI solution with Dynamics 365, make sure that the integration provides enough flexibility to accommodate these partner requirements.

Eliminate manual processes

The ROI of automating EDI processes varies depending on the frequency and importance of your data exchanges with other organizations. If you send or receive just a few documents each month, a fully automatic solution might not deliver enough value to justify the cost of implementation.

While integrating your EDI platform with Dynamics 365 will automate many manual processes, some ancillary processes might continue to be performed manually. Before you go the extra mile and attempt to eliminate these additional steps, define your specific EDI integration goals and determine the value you expect from automating each manual process. This will give you a clear picture of what you stand to gain from end-to-end automation of supply chain communication.

Data accessibility and privacy

If there are regulations or internal policies that prevent you from storing some types of business information in the public cloud, you will have to take this into consideration while planning to integrate your EDI solution with Dynamics 365. Instead of simply using Dynamics 365 or Azure cloud storage, you might have to implement a hybrid solution. These requirements add cost and complexity, so you should be aware of them before you begin integration.

Conclusion

Organizations that prepare a complete roadmap of the EDI integration process are rewarded with faster time to value, lower implementation costs, fewer delays, and higher ROI. For more information on best practices for integrating EDI with Dynamics 365, contact PartnerLinQ for a complimentary consultation.

The success of your business is inextricably linked to the performance of your supply chain. Even intermittent hiccups in replenishment schedules or minor inaccuracies in demand forecasting can quickly become sources of uncertainty, fulfillment delays, and major business risk. Keeping in constant contact with your suppliers and other vendors is the simplest way to avoid these issues.

However, exchanging complex business requirements and important documents comes with challenges of its own. Here are a few supply chain communication issues that retailers commonly experience, and ways that dedicated digital solutions address these challenges.

Poor Document Management

Many businesses rely heavily on email for a wide range of day-to-day business processes, including coordinating orders and invoices with their suppliers. While email is far more convenient than phone calls and conventional mail, it’s still a very inefficient and error-prone way to conduct business.

Imagine creating a purchase order as a PDF and sending it to your supplier via email, only to realize that you forgot to attach the actual PO document! Or how about those times when you spend precious minutes hunting for the right invoice or PO through hundreds of emails? Maybe you saved the email attachments to a separate folder on your computer, and you’re not sure which file is the most recent version. Maybe you need to find out how many POs you sent to each of your suppliers this week… When you’re working against the clock to fulfill orders on time, these aren’t the sort of details you should be spending your time on.

Specialized digital solutions for communicating with trading partners and suppliers is much faster and more convenient than email. Instead of preparing a paper document, scanning it, attaching it to an email and sending the email to the right address, you can send the same information from your organization’s ERP system directly to your supplier or partner’s ERP system. This kind of partner integration provides fewer opportunities for manual error, and takes far less time and effort.

Incompatible Partner Standards

Dozens of data formats and data transport protocols exist, so it shouldn’t surprise you to discover that your suppliers use different standards than you do. Some use XML while others use JSON. Some might even use their own proprietary formats.

It isn’t just data formats that differ from partner to partner. Each organization has its own set of business rules that it applies to each type of document the send or receive, or even to specific segments or fields in a document. Fail to comply with these rules and you might be asked to prepare and send those documents again eliminate the complexity caused by mismatched standards by intelligently translating between different standards and keeping track of each vendor’s unique set of business rules. These features are especially useful when you need to onboard a new trading partner quickly.

Scalability

If your company only sends fifteen or twenty business documents a day, email might actually be a workable solution for vendor communication. However, as soon as your business grows and you begin to send fifty to a hundred documents each day, relying on email will cripple your operations. Put simply, email fails to scale.

Modern organizations need to plan ahead and choose communication systems that can support peak transactional workloads, even if their business growth exceeds all expectations. Modern partner communication solutions are designed to process thousands of transactions an hour without any noticeable slowdowns. If your communication infrastructure becomes sluggish under high workloads, your efficiency will suffer, and so will your bottom line.

Each of the pain points mentioned above can wreak havoc on your ability to align inventory with demand and efficiently fulfill orders, and ultimately result in business risk, lower margins, or even loss of business. A scalable supply chain communication solution that integrates with your organization’s ERP platform is a worthwhile investment, and if you don’t have a modern system in place already, now is the time to explore your options.