Our client, a distinguished beet sugar cooperative with a legacy dating back to the early 1900s, faced critical challenges during its business communications platform upgrade.
Get the inside scoop on how our client leveraged PartnerLinQ to:
Our client is a renowned German shoe manufacturer, known for its high-quality and comfortable footwear. With global headquarters and major facilities in Germany, the company sells its products in over 90 countries. However, the company faced challenges with its outdated infrastructure, including an AS400 system and legacy EDI systems, hindering its growth and efficiency. To address these issues, the company embarked on a digital transformation journey with PartnerLinQ, a cloud-based solution provider.
Discover how a leading convenience store chain & energy solutions provider, with a rich history dating back to 1926, achieved operational excellence and unprecedented scalability with PartnerLinQ’s advanced B2B & EDI capabilities. Balancing expansive retail operations with technological advancements, our client faced the challenge of streamlining third-party logistics and managing escalating operating costs.
Discover how we helped a luxury department store rapidly deploy an end-to-end digital solution during the COVID-19 outbreak. With a typical eCommerce implementation taking 5-8 months, the store needed a technology partner that could develop an online storefront in just a few months.
Learn how PartnerLinQ helped one of the world’s largest home retailers address challenges related to B2B API & EDI, including infrequent and unreliable updates, gaps in automation, and a lack of advanced reporting functionality. PartnerLinQ’s cloud-native multi-tenant platform delivers end-to-end visibility, flexibility, connectivity, and control, streamlining processes, automating workflows, and enhancing visibility for shippers, transportation & logistics providers, and thousands of carrier partners.
ITO EN is a multinational beverage company that specializes in green tea and is the largest green tea distributor in Japan. Established in 1966, the company markets packaged and ready-to-drink tea products, focusing on the distribution and sales of its products.
North Bay Distribution has been a prominent name in the warehousing, order fulfillment, and shipping industry for more than 40 years. Over this time, North Bay has developed an in-house warehousing system that has been deployed across its warehouses in the US and Canada.
Rapid growth in North Bay’s business, its customers’ businesses, and its number of warehouses had made their existing solution difficult to manage. North Bay required an agile, scalable solution for rapid vendor onboarding, warehousing support, and support for their eCommerce system.
The Collected Group— a leading global designer, distributor, and retailer of contemporary, women’s apparel lifestyle brands, lacked a robust apparel inventory management system. PartnerLinQ enabled inventory visibility and enhanced partner collaborations, reducing the client’s operational inefficiencies and improving their ability to handle multiple sales channels.
Raw materials are not only the building blocks of any product we consume but also the starting point. From consumer electronics to food products, manufacturers are involved in procuring, shipping, and storing massive volumes of raw material every day. This makes ensuring adequate supply and efficient management of raw materials critical for all companies involved in the production of goods. Moreover, raw materials are often an investment that affects cash flow as raw material costs have soared in recent months. Listed as an asset on a company’s balance sheet, soaring costs often mean increased value even during a decline in sales.
Over the last few decades, product companies have been expanding their sourcing networks for cost optimization, looking to strike the best deals in terms of material and logistics costs. This, in turn, has led to increasingly complex supply chains for raw materials filled with single producers of raw goods and strategic partnerships. However, following the disruptions brought about by COVID-19, manufacturers face increasing “cost pressures”, primarily due to shortages in the global workforce. At the same time, they are facing a scarcity of raw materials and, in particular, ingredients. This has led to increased complexities in the supply chains.
Such complexities can easily disturb the delicate balance between supply and demand if not effectively managed. Overstocks, understocks, and product quality and compliance issues can add even more complexities to transportation and warehousing and disrupt the production process. Many smaller producers lack adequate cash flows and reserve capacity to recover from these challenges despite higher company value.
Working with our clients, many of them are product companies, we have identified the following key issues impacting the supply chain of their raw materials:
A raw material supply chain incurs several layers of cost related to energy, transportation and communication, logistics, labor, and even the adoption of newer technologies. While controlling operating costs is often a continuous challenge, a company cost management model can often be short-term and functionally focused. Therefore, optimizing supply chain costs demands greater insight. Through insight, companies can develop analysis models that align with their business values, functional outcomes, and long-term business valuation.
Traceability and transparency are essential in minimizing raw material safety and compliance issues, and visibility is the first step in that process. Companies need the ability to trace materials from the point of manufacture through their entire journey to the point of delivery. Whether inbound or outbound transactions and product flow, it is no longer ‘safe’ to use an age-old “one up / one down” methodology for tracking trade goods. Additionally, consumers are becoming increasingly curious about where their ingredients come from. So, accurate and real-time information from every node across the network can help enhance your brand value and increase customer loyalty. On the other hand, a lack of visibility exposes a company to undue risk and expenses.
Fragmented information and a lack of communication leave parties in the supply network without visibility into each other’s actions, leading to inefficiency. A trade relationship lacking collaboration will surely escalate supply chain problems, particularly as markets and raw material networks expand.
Many challenges in supply chain management and raw material partner networks are traceable to outdated systems and processes that depend on traditional paper tracking, manual inspection, and black box integrations lacking adequate reporting systems. Although short linear supply chains can be optimized using spreadsheets or siloed software, modern material partner networks are more complex, involving complicated business relations. Such network complexities include packaging and process materials, which are better served by integrated supply chain solutions that avoid mass customization.
As the ‘Great Disruption’ continues, markets remain volatile. Fluctuating material prices and logistical disruptions due to lockdowns continue to affect the global supply of raw materials. Also, quarantine requirements continue to affect the manufacture of raw materials and finished goods. This raises the urgency for industry leaders to take a more innovative approach to raw material supply chain management. It comprises improvements in forecasting, flexibility, transparency, and increased visibility to capitalize on the new normal.
Industry leaders need to use such forecasts effectively to plan and minimize the impact of volatilities in day-to-day operations. Additionally, leverage a solution that drives down costs and provides a competitive edge via end-to-end supply chain visibility, gaining more stability.
Modern supply chain solutions can go a long way in formalizing and optimizing raw materials inventory and management.
A supply chain solution that seamlessly integrates with data management technologies makes a business more efficient and less vulnerable to uncertainty. Advanced data management helps you to optimize inventory control through the following key capabilities:
Maintains a consistent flow of information and insights across raw material partner networks, concerned departments, and business functions within the organization.
Removes the need to maintain multiple integrations, bringing historical data, open orders, and shipping and invoice data into one unified digital connectivity, integration platform, and transaction processing model.
Generate reporting based on real-time transaction processing to enable real-time and data-driven decision-making.
Combines data contained by the unified digital connectivity and integration platform and transaction processing model with improvements in visibility to reduce inventory spikes and shortages.
Delivers visibility to your team so they may allocate funds to functions like procurement, processing, and production in time to ensure the quality and timely delivery of your products.
Although supply chain leaders understand the need for streamlined processes related to raw material management, they have had to rely on historical data or educated guesses to forecast future raw material demand for too long. However, data-driven forecasting resulting from functional collaboration and a unified digital platform eliminates waste, improves efficiency, and ensures the on-time delivery of quality products while reducing overall inventory costs.
That’s not all. Organizations with such a data-driven, analytical approach to collaboration can stay more informed while keeping an eye on raw material inventory and gaining significant competitive and cost advantages.
PartnerLinQ is a hosted integration platform for EDI, B2B, and API integration; and is the flagship product of Visionet’s industry expertise and technology leadership. The PartnerLinQ team at Visionet has 25 years of experience providing industry-focused technology, consulting, and innovative solutions that drive global supply chain transformation from the factory to the end consumer.
PartnerLinQ is an innovative, process-centric, easy-to-use EDI solution that enables API-led, cloud-native integrations. It includes a simplified B2B communication engine that combines EDI, AS2, SFTP, and real-time APIs and easily handles proprietary file-based formats and custom integrations. With its overarching capabilities, PartnerLinQ is well suited for retail, e-commerce, wholesale, transportation, 3PL, distribution, and digital and analog partner ecosystems, helping your team achieve operational efficiency and gain real-time visibility.
Visionet, a Microsoft Gold Partner, leverages Microsoft Azure for the PartnerLinQ platform. The PartnerLinQ platform can process thousands of transactions simultaneously across a variety of transfer protocols. Moreover, it transforms X12, XML, Flat Files, CSV, IDocs, and custom formats and can integrate them into more than 74 ERP, WMS, and TMS systems.
Along with its job scheduling and batch job capabilities, PartnerLinQ’s ability to manage increased transaction volume means the entirety of the business workflow is much easier to manage than the black box integrations of yesteryear. Additionally, by optimizing its business rules engine, an extensive library, and ERP integration, PartnerLinQ enables easy partner onboarding, simplified configuration, and access to visual data mappings.
EDI is a simple electronic format that replaces paper-based documents and is used for intercompany communication in the standard form. Information sharing might occur within an organization or with third-party organizations or business partners.
The EDI solutions focus on providing quick and accurate data interchange and using existing EDI solutions that can help optimize your supply chain operations.
There are several supply-chain issues that you might face as a business owner. These include inaccuracies in calculation and unwanted system delays. There’s also a chance of business transactions that may be paper-dependent.
More companies have increased digital platform use, and the demand for instant information has increased. The transactions done manually may only sometimes be ideal to meet this requirement. Fortunately, EDI can help you here.
Understanding the difference between EDI and Non-EDI solutions can impact how your business operates and scales. Here’s a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental differences between the two.
The process order cycle is tiring and can impact your business’s overall efficiency. The process might involve multiple departments of the company. The efficiency of these systems determines how much time it takes for supplier payments. Therefore, a shorter and more efficient order system is the key to long-term business success.
A stand-alone EDI or a non-integrated one doesn’t operate according to the ERP system. Therefore, there’s higher manual-handling involved compared to an integrated EDI. It contributes to a lengthy purchase cycle and makes it more challenging. On the contrary, the integrated EDI connects your ERP systems (internally) and automates the purchase cycle.
Today, multiple internal and external business parties stay connected for commerce-related tasks. The link has made communication transparent and increased the process’s complexity. Fortunately, an integrated EDI can adjust to this complexity.
The separate EDI may not operate appropriately with ERP systems, which makes it challenging to maintain buying and selling speeds. The integrated ERP has excellent responsiveness and can handle multiple trading partners and payments simultaneously with minimal human interference.
The accuracy of procedures determines the long-term survival and profit of companies. A simple error in this calculation can negatively affect the third-party and external processes within your business. It will impact your vendor relationship and business reputation in the industry.
A stand-alone EDI may not be the best choice in these circumstances because there’s a higher possibility of errors. Apart from that, there may not be proper communication with the other ERP applications. This miscommunication can lead to substantial data loss.
The integrated EDIs can substantially increase the accuracy of the process used in the purchase. The integrated EDI systems can manage the systems and form proper communication with other ERP processes without a problem.
Process efficiency impacts the productivity of the staff and directly impacts the business profit margin. EDI software is the best-suited option for businesses that wish to improve team and process efficiency for maximum ROI.
The stand-alone EDIs require training to monitor the purchase process and supervise the complete steps. The other EDIs automate and integrate the systems, allowing the teams to focus on significant tasks.
Thus, integrated EDI can boost the overall efficiency and productivity of the process and the team involved in the business. Moreover, the higher volume of purchase orders in a non-integrated EDI is much less than the integrated one.
The purchase order business requires a lot of expenses, impacting the profit potential of the business model. It is true that some of these expenses must remain the same, as you cannot reduce or change them. However, with improvements and efficiency, you can change processing costs.
For instance, the right EDI system can cut labor costs by avoiding the supervision of teams. It also allows business owners to reduce the payment cycles and complete vendor payments on time.
Thus, this little EDI system change saves the business from facing chargebacks. Moreover, it lets them avail special discounts by vendors on an early payment. The stand-alone EDI may not consistently have the same efficient results.
The time required by a business for the implementation process and the procedure complexity or challenge determines the cost of implementation. A well-crafted business process involves planning and addressing issues and prerequisites for formal implementations.
The integrated EDI software can connect to multiple internal and external applications and optimize the process. However, this option may be challenging to incorporate into your business.
Thus, you may need more time and resources to implement the integrated EDIs over non-integrated EDI ones.
EDI Service Providers: How to Decide?
The EDI technology may have more costs and need more time for incorporation, but it can offer benefits in the long term. Business owners may not get these benefits with the non-integrated EDI technology.
The integrated EDI is more flexible and can be scaled to match your organizational growth.
Integrated EDI solutions increase the efficiency and productivity of your business. They offer the best alternatives for better data sharing and management.
They can also help improve processing costs, increase staff productivity, and offer greater process accuracy. With the inclusion of integrated EDI systems, your business is likely to grow, better and faster.
If you are dealing with problems in supply chain management, a professional services provider can help you optimize the overall experience. PartnerLinQ could be the answer to your problems. PartnerLinQ has been serving the supply chain industry for many years and can give you valuable insights into everything about supply chain.