In an era marked by evolving trade dynamics, geopolitical tensions, climate uncertainties, and labor disruptions, executives seek heightened agility to weather the storm. To fortify against these challenges, leaders in logistics and transportation must prioritize adaptive solutions that align with evolving supply chain demands.
While the Thanksgiving holiday has passed and we remain grateful for another wonderful year, we were treated to a visit from the technology elves on our return. The elves mentioned that they were hard at work finalizing the new release of PartnerLinQ as the holidays approach and were stopping by in order to demonstrate some its advanced features.
The platform has been given an upgrade and the dashboard is sleek, smooth and faster than ever before. an ever before.
Recent Activities, located in the center, ensures PartnerLinQ customers remain proactively informed of the latest activities.
Recently Assigned Customers are just to the left, ensuring PartnerLinQ customers actively engaged in onboarding have a front row seat. It’s here that PartnerLinQ customers can visually ascertain the status of any onboarding customer at any point in the onboarding process.
Systems and Tasks alerts are on the right, and subscriptions can be toggled on and off by the user at any time.
Further down and always visible is a Support button that helpfully opens the support window.
With one-click you can search the support FAQ and access email and telephone support. The platform features Google-like search functionality at the top of the page, ensuring that anything a PartnerLinQ customer is looking for is one click away.
We make it easy. We keep it simple. And it is all in one place.
This holiday season, we are reminded that the evolution of PartnerLinQ has been a special process. From the very beginning, our commitment to “making it easy and keeping it simple and putting everything in one place” has been an inspiration to not only our team and the technology elves, it has also inspired prospects to become customers and strangers to become friends. Now, having been on this path for a few years, the next few years are looking even more promising.
Putting everything in one place is a core tenet of the PartnerLinQ extensible platform. Everything is accessible, from a selection of widgets that can be added to the user’s home screen to a selection of APIs and tools that can be added to your PartnerLinQ subscription. Speaking with some of our customers recently, the reaction to the new extensible platform has been, “I can’t wait for Christmas!”
The upgrade to the new PartnerLinQ Platform, like everything else we do, is included with the platform. We’re all about making it easy and while the Azure-hosted subscription model has been available for some time, some self-hosted and licensed PartnerLinQ instances remain. PartnerLinQ customers keeping it simple today on the self-hosted and licensed PartnerLinQ instances will benefit from the ways we are making it easier tomorrow.
We think of the apps as the best presents under the tree this year. Instant Ocean and Scan2EDI are the first of many PartnerLinQ solutions moving to the PartnerLinQ “in-app” subscription model. Available exclusively to PartnerLinQ customers, PartnerLinQ apps connect subscribers with Visionet IP products, factories, distributors, 3PL service providers, payment gateways, and more.
Instant Ocean is the newest PartnerLinQ IP and brings real value to PartnerLinQ customers who are also ocean freight participants. Instant Ocean is an “in-app” subscription to complete container visibility delivered to the user dashboard. Imagine integrated, automated, and reliable ocean status at your fingertips. Instant Ocean container updates can be delivered to the PartnerLinQ dashboard or directly to the enterprise. Instant Ocean even makes use of business rules and alerting so you can have it your way. Your port, your container, Trans-Atlantic, Trans-Pacific, and everywhere in between. Instant Ocean removes human intervention from your ocean-going freight and delivers real business insight.
Scan2EDI assembles the best modern technologies in one easy-to-use solution reaching well beyond that of ordinary optical character recognition (OCR). Beginning with OCR, PartnerLinQ makes use of robotic process automation (RPA) for data retrieval and data extraction, OCR for transformation, indexing, and image storage, and document management software in our intuitive PartnerLinQ platform interface.
PartnerLinQ’s business process outsourcing ensures that any transaction not immediately recognized receives an initial review and response so that PartnerLinQ customers have the option to add transactions, integrations, vendors, and customers mid-flow. This can happen because mapping and error handling are fully automated, the function includes business rules that fit our client’s business expectations, and with built-in alerts, no transactions are ever overlooked or missed. Artificial intelligence ensures transactions are sorted, tagging, and routed through processing and should an unexpected transaction be encountered, automated error handling takes care of the alerting your business team.
Application integration is what PartnerLinQ’s Scan2EDI was designed for and with our enterprise integration framework, Scan2EDI transactions land as expected in the enterprise whether they’re purchase orders (POs), advanced ship notices (ASNs), invoices, shipping documents, or any of the 500-plus available transactions that Scan2EDI was designed to handle out of the box.
Whatever holidays you celebrate, we think that PartnerLinQ’s evolution is a reason for good cheer. With better visibility and flexibility, we’re adding even more resilience to your supply chain, and in these uncertain times as we sort out the “new normal,” resilience is the key to success.
So, enjoy the time off from work, spend time doing the things you love, and we’ll see you in the new year with a new evolution of the PartnerLinQ solution that will keep you singing “Happy Holidays” well into the new year. Talk with our experts to learn more.
By Thomas A Smith Senior EDI Implementation Strategy Consultant
The global marketplace today can perhaps be described as volatile. Prices are on the rise, shortages are popping up unexpectedly and in unexpected places. Many major retail grocers are expecting center store sales to increases, an indication of things to come.
While supply chains have become more extensive and interconnected, they have also shown unprecedented instability in the face of disruption. In the wake of COVID-19, the fragile stability of lean supply chains found difficulty in recovering quickly in the face of disruption. What has emerged is a succession of supply side ripples across multiple industries. The ripples collide until at last they reach the end of the line and, similar to the domino effect, as one chain ends another begins in sequence. Many of the assumptions upon which the lean manufacturing model was created, were undone by market and environment variables that emerged during the onset of the COVID disruption.
Organizations are beginning to accept a pretense of recovery amid a truly formidable challenge of accelerated customer demand and labor shortages, and while research indicates that retail sales can grow by as much as 10.5% to 13.5% to generate more than USD 4.4 trillion in this year, there are concerns. Having undergone unprecedented and unwelcome change throughout the past year, suppliers require stability and flexibility to tackle the surging demand. Resisting instability forms the key priority for retail suppliers, which brings focus to resilience.
21% That’s the number of respondents in a recent Gartner survey who affirmed that they have a resilient network at present. Giving context to the figure, resilience implies elevated visibility, persistent velocity in moving product from source to destination while avoiding supply chain constraints. In this current moment of volatility in the market, it is imperative for retail suppliers and retail enterprises to increase their supply chain resilience.
Becoming more resilient is no longer a luxury for supply chain leaders. The long-standing tradition of lean manufacturing and its entrenched philosophy will be the challenge to overcome. Supply chains need to be efficient as well as resilient, and practices such as redundant supply chain operations, alternative factories, and ample safety stock need to be developed in parallel with productivity and performance improvements. Supply chains also need to maintain compliance substituting lesser performing partners for those more suited following the COVID disruption. The widespread disruptions affected supply chain monitoring and audit and while enforcement may have been relaxed, performance improvements can only be brought about by effective monitoring and accounting. In order to holistically build a resilient supply chain network, retail suppliers need specific data elements to be incorporated into their supply chain and a robust solution methodology which combines five important elements is key.
A surefire approach to building supply chain resilience in retail is ensuring anytime, anyone, anywhere communication, systems need to be ‘access anywhere’ supportive of SSO (Single Sign on) and active directory. Manual partner-to-partner communication requires a lot of paperwork and must be reduced in light of staffing shortages. Manual communication methodologies lead to errors and errors mean more human intervention. Automatic and secure document flows compatible with multiple enterprise level system and capable of a variety of data interchange formats and in real time delivers resilience.
A significant aspect of resilience is ironing out friction within the network. A resilient supply chain must be flexible and able to fix critical issues with the least amount of effort. ‘Fix-on-the-fly’ functionality reducing human interaction increases flexibility. An efficient business rule manager is key to incorporate such flexibility. Reusable business rules ensure seamless partner onboarding and transaction integration. Reusable sets of business rules allow for the conservation of scarce technical resources and ease of use. The addition of reusable rules to rule sets to overcome existing issues, and proactive alerting based on business rules means time to make a correction where and when necessary. Change, through a business rules engine can be automated and in real time. Audit functions mean changes can be rolled out, and rolled back if that become necessary.
Perhaps the greatest lesson that the past year has taught suppliers in retail has been the importance of adaptation. The transition to digital and the prominence of ecommerce platforms has been well documented in the retail industry. An omnichannel strategy covers all potential channels for distribution and sales. An omnichannel strategy makes sense amid market disruptions such as we’ve seen this past year and a half. An omnichannel strategy means demand can be met with convenience and speed. While a stand-alone omnichannel strategy as a solution is one way to meet demand, leveraging a common process workflow to bring transactions in or out of the enterprise the same way every time means an increased ability to create multiple trading relationships and do so quickly. By eliminating the need for additional support or maintenance, a common process workflow takes partner on boarding to a new level while increasing the utility of business rules reduces the dependencies on map and mapping activities. Combining centralized B2B communication with such a workflow results in a highly independent system in which transactions and business processes are handled automatically, accounting for connection changes, partner onboarding, acquisitions, mergers and complete enterprise migration without adding disruption.
With much of the COVID disruption behind, and planning and change ahead, compliance has never been more important for retail suppliers. A flexible and effective event notification processor to stay on top of supply chain events and issues in real time becomes a valuable tool. Such rules-based processing must be backed by comprehensive audits, reports, and analytics. Such tools must be visible across the internal supply chain operation. Transaction transportation, transformation and integration tools must include analytics to ensure consistent business operations, keeping disparate teams in touch with the latest goings-on in the supply chain domain.
Accepting resilience is just the first step. The path includes overcoming challenges like supply chain and labor shortages and success in resilience is achieved by combining five key elements:
A resilient path will quickly deliver an elevated level of performance, particularly important as the retail industry begins to leave the COVID disruption behind and starts to engage with the new normal.
5 March, 2020 – Business technology solutions and services provider , Visionet Systems Inc. launched its flagship digital supply chain connectivity solution, PartnerLinQ, today. PartnerLinQ rapidly enhances the scalability of global operations and delivers complete control, visibility, and transparency to enterprises across their supply chains and eCommerce.
To learn more, visit the PartnerLinQ website.
Digital connectivity for the new era
The procure-to-pay (P2P) cycle allows businesses to inquire about, request, receive, and pay for goods and services. Most P2P cycles involve several stages:
A paper-based P2P cycle involves a lot of manual steps, including the review of PO, receipt, and invoice documents:
The manual process can take anywhere from 7 to 10 days, including the time it takes to send and receive documents, validate them, and enter them into the appropriate systems.
An EDI can automate these processes and largely eliminate the need to communicate by phone, fax, or email:
An EDI-automated procure-to-pay cycle requires much less human intervention, works extremely efficiently, and is much less susceptible to human error. The total processing time is 1-3 days compared to 7-10 days for the manual P2P cycle.
Some of the specific advantages of EDI automation in the P2P cycle include:
Using EDI to automate your P2P cycle will help your organization boost operational efficiency, shorten time to market, and eliminate costly errors and rework. EDI solutions like PartnerLinQ can automate paper-based, flat-file, and API processes and bridge the gap between traditional and non-traditional EDI transaction structures by integrating data from trading partners into your company’s enterprise system and business processes.
If you’re interested in taking advantage of these benefits by adding EDI to your P2P cycle, get in touch with a PartnerLinQ expert today.
In an environment of ever-changing consumer demand, your retail or manufacturing business needs to leverage every competitive advantage it has at its disposal. Modern global businesses rely on electronic data interchange (EDI) solutions to maximize operational efficiency and maintain market competitiveness.
Businesses use EDI technology to innovate on operational strategy, enhance supply chain management, and improve operational performance. Most large manufacturers and retailers coordinate their operations via EDI, from sending and receiving purchase orders and invoices to advance ship notices (ASNs) and product transfer reports.
So becoming an EDI-capable organization signals to potential trading partners that you are a trustworthy party that uses standards-based supply chain practices, and helps you unlock the door to global trade. However, EDI’s primary advantage lies in the vast improvements in operational efficiency it offers over paper-based processes.
Even though EDI promotes uniformity through the use of communication standards, not all EDI solutions are created equal. Many older EDI systems only use one EDI format and don’t support any modern, non-EDI communication standards. Many of these legacy systems (and even some newer “web EDI” solutions) require users to manually key in information, and may even require them to manually initiate and end the EDI transfer!
These methods, while better than using paper documents and a courier service, are ancient relics from the 20th century. If your organization still uses this kind of software, you should make it a priority to have it replaced with a supply chain connectivity solution that integrates directly with your ERP software. Here are three ways that an ERP-integrated EDI solution significantly improves efficiency:
Direct EDI ERP integration means that you’ll hardly ever need to manually type information to send it to a vendor (or type received information back into your ERP system).
Since all information on your products, pricing, inventory, sales transactions, customers, and deliveries are already stored in your ERP system, you’ll usually be able to select the information you want to send with a few clicks. Then, depending on your operating procedures, you can either transmit that information to the appropriate trading partner right away or add it to a scheduled batch transfer.
More advanced EDI solutions will also confirm that the ERP information that you’re about to send complies with your trading partners’ internal policies for those specific document types. This is definitely much quicker and more convenient than consulting a separate compliance checklist for each vendor every time you transmit information.
By reducing its dependence on manual entry, your organization will spend less time managing information transfers, correcting transcription errors, and running damage control due to the errors you failed to catch in time. You’ll also improve supplier relationships and save a surprising amount of money on EDI chargebacks caused by noncompliant information transfers.
A well-designed supply chain connectivity solution also improves efficiency by speeding up the onboarding of new trading partners. Instead of requiring days of configuration, modern EDI systems use intelligent field-mapping techniques to automatically reconcile your partners’ data and document formats with your own. The sooner you complete the onboarding process, the sooner you experience the benefits of a digital supply chain connectivity solution.
A seamless EDI ERP integration also allows you to start using advanced, ERP-integrated analytics tools to gain a better understanding of your trading partners. In the same way that your ERP system’s dynamic dashboards and advanced reporting capabilities provide actionable insights about your organization’s internal processes, they will also begin providing clear, easy-to-understand intelligence on how each of your vendors is performing.
Now you can anticipate and adapt to supply-side changes more quickly. Decision-makers will have access to the information they need to respond to emerging opportunities and challenges in real time.
Industry-leading EDI solution providers like PartnerLinQ provide end-to-end ERP-integrated solutions that drive efficiency by minimizing manual entry, expediting partner onboarding, and enhancing decision-making agility. Contact Us to request a demo.
For many enterprises EDI is the main source of how revenue flows into the business. It’s often considered the lifeblood of a company. If not done well there can be a great deal of risk and hardship.
Managing an EDI campaign requires a specific knowledge base that few have. Different from other areas of business these skills are not widely carried across the majority of today’s technical staffs. Generally companies are lucky to have a small handful of people with this unique background. This makes choosing the correct software/service provider and delivery model imperative to avoid problems that could damage customer relationships and cash flow.
Many other technology platforms that companies invest in have inherent cross training. CRM and ERP environments often have large teams of people that work on them and in them on a daily basis. This is rarely the case with EDI.
For years companies didn’t have much choice when it came to B2B community enablement. They are mandated to participate by their trading partners and this would require them to buy software and hire the appropriate technical talent. Fortunately today there are choices. Some still buy the software, maintain the environment and staff required. Some take advantage of other delivery models and offload much of the heavy lifting when it comes to EDI.
There are three general delivery models to choose from:
On premise / self-managed model has been around for forty years. This is a common choice for companies that still desire to keep everything in-house and don’t assign a great deal of importance to a cloud strategy.
Hosted / self-managed model is similar. The end user still needs to maintain the staff with the required skillset. Their EDI environment may be collocated in an offsite data center but the company is still responsible for the daily maintenance of the environment, adding transaction sets / trading partners and error resolution.
With the prevalence of cloud based ERP and CRM solutions today the two models above, for some, make less sense and carry a risk of failure. Getting and keeping EDI capable people has become difficult. Companies that have made the decision to implement a cloud/managed service delivered ERP/CRM see the value in outsourcing.
When making a decision on which direction and delivery model to choose a company needs to look a three things. Does this provider line up with your cloud strategy? Do you want to maintain EDI capabilities in-house? Do you see the value and reduced risk involved with today’s cloud/managed service delivery? The answers to these three questions should help point you in the right direction. To learn more please Contact PartnerLinQ.