EDI & Scan-based Trading

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Make scan-based trading work to your competitive advantage; drive point-of-sale retail/supply relationships

Scan-based trading (SBT) is the process where suppliers maintain ownership of inventory within retailers' warehouses and stores until the item has been scanned at the point of sale (POS).

In theory, suppliers can sell more product with SBT than with traditional retail systems because they have greater visibility and control. The supplier gets daily alerts to replenish its wares - which means more sales - and is able to gather nearly real-time data about the performance of products store by store. Forecasting, production planning, and product targeting can be improved and suppliers can aggressively push their products and ensure that there's always inventory, especially at their busier retail outlets.

But SBT also shifts financial risk from the retailer to the supplier, putting the onus on the supplier to manage order tracking, inventory management, invoicing, etc. more efficiently. Without such a system in place, the process, and the business relationship, is likely doomed.

Internet EDI: The Standard for Scan-based Trading

Collaboration between retailers and suppliers is nothing new, but SBT signifies a fundamental shift in the way retailers and their suppliers work together. Which is where Internet EDI comes in. As a widely adopted standard for data interchange, EDI facilitates SBT on a global scale. Doing EDI over the Internet drives down costs dramatically (VANs and dedicated lines are expensive) – something the bottom-line driven retail industry is all too cognizant of.

CyberFusion Integration Suite (CFI)™, from Proginet, is a complete B2B solution to address all aspects of EDI. CFI provides the real time transportation and communications mechanisms to make scan-based trading a business reality. The CFI Suite is made up of the following components:

Use CFI to Drive Your Organization's Competitive Advantage

CFI facilitates lights out, unattended operations to completely manage, control, and audit the movement of SBT information. Its event driven alert management system audits the movement of every critical SBT transaction from the time the information is generated until it is received and acknowledged by your trading partner.

CFI's Commerce Server component closely mirrors your business processes while ensuring that the information sent also meets the needs of your SBT partners. This process typically includes the synchronization of Locations (816), Items (832), Daily Sales (852), Shipments (856), Receiving (861), Taxation (812), and Payment (820) between you and your SBT partners.

CFI's Internet Server module provides the connectivity between Commerce Server and your suppliers and trading partners, providing you with the flexibility of communicating in a variety of possible mechanisms, whether it's via value added network (VAN) or over the Internet using AS2, FTP, FTPS, SFTP or HTTPS. CFI's Platform Server provides the connectivity between the Commerce Server and your internal back-end applications. All activity within CFI can be controlled and managed from the Command Center, a centralized interface that can be accessed from any standard Web browser.

Talk to Proginet today to find out how we can help you more effectively manage your inventory, logistics, and supplier/trading-partner relationships. Make scan-based trading work to your competitive advantage.