Retail EDI

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Welcome to Retail EDI!

Retail BI: Strategic Approach vs. Application...

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During the past three months we have engaged with several food and non-food retailers about their usage of BI and analytic tools. An initial finding from these conversations is that the debate around BI flexibility, ROI, TCO and performance is far from over.

BI applications for reporting and business performance monitoring are typically having a long lifecycle, e.g. 5 to 10 years, passing through several upgrades – and more recently vendor mergers - and some development work.

 

How Retailers Are Delivering POS Data and Analytics to Their Vendors for Improved Performance

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In this challenging climate, hundreds of retailers are seeing the merits of providing more and more Point-of-Sale (POS) information to their vendor community in an effort to help better manage proper inventory levels and collaborate with their various trading partners. At the same time, retailers are expecting more from their vendors, focusing more on accountability and vendor scorecarding to increase key performance indicators, such as fill rates and on-time deliveries, than ever before. 

The retailer practice of providing POS data to their vendors has been in existence for some time. It got its start early in vendor managed inventory (VMI) models. The difference is the eagerness of the vendor community to better collaborate with the retailer’s buyers and have improved visibility into the actual sales of their items after leaving their distribution center. Vendors are investing in technologies to give them this insight, and are frankly very keen to receive POS information to help them manage their business relationships, be prepared to ship their items when a retailer send their next order, and perform better in vendor scorecarding models. While retailers have traditionally sent out POS information in the form of EDI 852 data files, otherwise known as “product activity data,” they’re trying to determine how to get this kind of information out to more and more of their vendors, and used by them. As such, they’re experimenting with a variety of new technological ways to efficiently distribute this data.

 

Exploring Feature, Service and Price in Retail EDI

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For years now we have seen great changes in how we conduct business.  Capabilities in out of the box systems like MS SQL Server (Probably from ’05 forward), and high speed bandwidth to name just two, have made it possible to do some very cool things over the last few years.  The proliferation of EDI usage in Retail is probably one of the smaller ones, but as an end to a means it is critical in Retail.  Many venture capitalists equate what EDI companies do and its function as “Middleware” because EDI doesn’t generate the data or consume it but simply communicates, transforms, etc.  EDI providers spin data to serve a myriad of purposes and a wide range of applications.  I am interested in how EDI users – Retailers and Suppliers – view innovation currently and how they see the EDI market.

 

Is Integration Becoming an Asset for the Cloud?

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Integration may be shifting from a liability to a non-issue and possibly even an asset for SaaS and cloud computing.

Two things make me think this. First, it seems some companies are moving their EDI (electronic data interchange) services to the cloud, which means they can finally eliminate those expensive, hosted value-added networks.

EDI is a pre-Internet standard for electronic commerce, commonly used by banks and ATMs. We're talking old-school, legacy technology dating back to the '60s and '70s here.

 

EDI Providers Innovating and Relevant

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As an industry, companies serving the Retail EDI sector need to innovate their messaging and get their staff trained to discuss more than simply helping people connect to retailers.  The needs of your market are evolving and the messaging coming from sales and marketing staff doesn’t seem to be keeping pace.  Sound a little irreverent?  Someone has to say it.  Right now people are saying the same thing about Oracle, Microsoft and others.  EDI providers are not immune.

 
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