Today‘s consumers have increasingly high expectations regarding produce, which creates major challenges for retailers and their business partners. For example clients want their fruit and vegetables to be fresh off the fields, they expect top-notch quality as well as the perfect degree of ripeness and they want sufficient amounts, too. In addition, they prefer regional and sustainably grown products. To meet these demands, suppliers need to scrutinize and optimize their logistics processes on a constant basis, even if these have worked well in the past.
Effortless communication presupposes easy processes
SPAR has always made regional products and close collaboration with local partners a priority. Many business processes are now increasingly handled electronically, which opens up a lot of opportunities regarding communication with regional suppliers while making previous communication processes obsolete.
“That is why EDITEL, our EDI partner of many years, and SPAR ICS, the IT service company of the SPAR Austria Group, teamed up in 2020 to develop a custom-fit solution,” said Michaela Eder, the EDI coordinator of SPAR Austria. “The introduction of such a system allowed us to simplify our procedures and improve communication processes with our suppliers.”
The new Web EDI portal connects directly to the SPAR supplier portal and allows for fully automated order processes. When SPAR places an order, the information leaves the company as an EDIFACT data set (ORDERS) via the data hub eXite® and reaches the supplier‘s Web EDI portal as a user-friendly order. Once the supplier has confirmed the order, an order confirmation message is sent back to SPAR and will then be directly integrated into SPAR‘s ERP system as a structured data set (ORDRSP).
One of the main challenges of this project was creating an updated data pool that matches SPAR‘s article and customer master data, which is key for Electronic Data Interchange.
Web EDI as a “small-scale ERP system”
Hermann Hadner, the EDI applications manager at SPAR, likes to call this solution a “small-scale ERP system that includes the main components of EDI-supported communication processes.” As planned, this successfully created an additional service for suppliers as an “out-of-the-box” solution for a swift and efficient connection to EDI.
