COVERSTORY 25
A.S. WATSON OUTSOURCES EDI
he world’s largest health and beauty retailer, A.S. Watson has signed a multi-year contract to outsource electronic data interchange (EDI) for its retail brands, stores and suppliers across Europe.
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As a large international retailer and production company with business activities worldwide A.S. Watson operates drugstore chains to luxury perfumeries, to shops with foods, electronics, general merchandising and airport shops. Confronted with internal and external challenges to optimise its supply chain operations, A.S. Watson identifi ed the rationalisation of its business-to-business (B2B) systems would increase effi ciency and reduce costs. A.S. Watson selected Transalis OpenEDI managed services to maximise its European supply chain effi ciency, to manage the entire B2B electronic enablement for up to 3,000 suppliers, across 16 European countries, for eight major High Street brands with up to 4,000 stores, including Superdrug, Savers and The Perfume Shop in the UK, ICI Paris XL in France and Kruidvat, Trekpleister, Drogas, Marionnaud across continental Europe. Transalis will integrate B2B messages using its software-as-a-service (SaaS) based OpenEDI solution directly with A.S. Watson’s three electronic resource planning (ERP) systems Retek, Navision and its own custom-built
platform.Message exchange will utilise the Transalis freeVAN (value-added network) EDI service, and suppliers will have access to a bespoke web-based and integrated A.S. Watson OpenEDI offering. Jos van Zeeland, group IT director for
A.S. Watson, said: “By outsourcing EDI to Transalis we expect to gain considerable improvement, reliability, and uniformity of B2B message exchange with our systems and our suppliers. Utilising Transalis Managed Services will help us reduce complexity, risk and cost with the aim of electronically enabling our European supply chain.”
Cloud EDI – reasons to switch The main reason businesses switch to cloud-based electronic data interchange
Welcome to OpenEDI™
EDI the way you want it.. Simple, affordable, no EDI software or EDI skills needed, fully managed global Web-based & Integrated EDI services.
Connect to everyone through OpenEDI™
(EDI) services is to reap the benefi ts of big business infrastructure, without having to implement and manage EDI directly, according to provider Transalis. Transalis said that, until recently, EDI software and servers almost always resided in the offi ce, where they would be administered by in-house IT staff, on- premise. In the last several years cloud-based EDI has become increasingly popular. This is because so-called “cloud EDI”
can improve employee productivity. Using Transalis web-based OpenEDI, employees and trading partners can easily access EDI documents in or out of the offi ce. Choosing or migrating to a cloud-based EDI solution can also reduce the upfront costs associated with implementing EDI, where there is no software or servers to buy and maintain. The cloud-based subscription model allows businesses to increase or decrease their use of cloud EDI services according to their needs. Employees and trading partners
everywhere can access and work with the same EDI fi les in real time, with no more emails back and forth with attachments to open, improving productivity. Studies have shown that more than 50%
of businesses will go out of business within a year of a major internal business systems failure, virus or cyber attack and data loss. In
a cloud EDI environment, Transalis said if a laptop – or worse, a whole offi ce – is lost, business can back to usual more quickly with EDI fi les remain securely in place. Transalis added that the transfer of
EDI information into the cloud is very straightforward. No need to install new hardware or software; no IT administration. It is seamless to the user. Saving EDI documents to an OpenEDI Cloud9 Drive is the same process as saving it to a hard drive. No training is required, and employees and trading partners access fi les via any computer, laptop, tablet or smartphone. Transalis also contends that cloud EDI can be more secure than traditional EDI infrastructure by building multiple levels of security and redundancy into its data centres, which offer global coverage. This, it added, meant that any organisation could rolling out EDI to all their large, small and medium-size trading partners for total supply chain EDI enablement.
Contact: Adam Swanson Transalis Ltd Email:
aswanson@transalis.com Tel: 0845 123 3746
www.transalis.com www.openEDI.com
MARCH/APRIL 2011 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY
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