Every year, PGV Austria, a magazine and newspaper distributor, delivers approximately 5,250 publications from 290 different publishers to some 8,400 retailers. To make things even more complex, detailed coordination is key to determine when, where, and how long a certain newspaper or magazine is available at the point of sale (POS).
Sophisticated logistics processes must be in place to achieve that. For more than 20 years, these have been handled exclusively via Electronic Data Interchange using eXite, the EDI platform by EDITEL. The platform still uses the EDI standard (EANCOM) developed by GS1 Austria in 1996, which caters specifically to the needs of newspaper and magazine distributors.
The new EDI solution in the cloud for PGV Austria
A locally installed converter was used to do the data conversion from the in-house format to the EDIFACT format. The data conversion procedure was overhauled during a process update last year. By switching to a future-proof outsourcing solution, the company wanted to free resources and achieve higher system stability. PGV Austria trusted the expertise of its long-standing EDI partner EDITEL for both data migration and the implementation and operation of the new cloud solution.
500,000 transactions per month
This is no easy feat, partially because the entire migration had to be performed during ongoing operations and EDITEL worked live in the retailer‘s real-time system. In addition, this project involved significant amounts of data, which amounted to almost 500,000 transactions per month. After an in-depth analysis, EDITEL focused on one thing: testing, testing, and more testing, until the final result was a smooth process that worked 100% of the time. EDITEL successfully reached this goal, and the client is very satisfied with the results:
“We owe the smooth transition first and foremost to the extraordinary dedication of EDITEL and our excellent collaboration with them,” said Gerhard Royer-Binder, the IT director of PGV Austria. It is quite fitting that Andreas Wieder, the EDI manager at PGV Austria, ironically described the entire migration process as a “true positive shock, in the sense that there was ultimately nothing for us to do.” It is safe to assume that no one was particularly upset by this turn of events.
