Smart Balance sells its goods to 75 Grocery customers
GFA Brands Inc., recently acquired by Smart Balance (NASDAQ symbol SMBL), sells its Smart Balance® Buttery Spreads, cheese and other foods to over 75 Grocery Chains and Wholesalers. It previously used an in-house EDI application to process its EDI orders and invoices. This old setup required many manual processes and was not at all streamlined. EDI Orders were downloaded by getting into the EDI application and manually polling their EDI mailbox. Then Smart Balance would hit another button to translate the orders into a text file format, manually copy it over to another server and put it through 2 more manual conversions to get it into a format it could import into its backend system. This cumbersome process was repeated several times a day. When invoices were exported once a day from their internal system, they'd be in a text file format that would have to be manually converted into a layout the EDI translator could handle. Then they'd get into the EDI application and manually force the translate command, and they'd go to another screen to initiate the transfer of the EDI documents to the VAN. There was simply too many manual steps in dealing with their business documents on a daily basis.
Smart Balance Needs:
- 75 Trading Partners (Kroger, Supervalu, Hannaford, Harris Teeter, Publix, etc.)
- Send 850/875 Purchase Orders
- Receive 810/880 Invoices
- Send and Receive various other documents (812,864,816,824,860)
- EDI Support: mapping, testing and interaction with their customer's EDI depts
- Integrate EDI with internal systems
Xebec Data determined that is could streamline the flow of the document so that manual intervention could be removed from the process. We designed our map and subsequent custom 850/875 processing program so the file ECLynx creates can be imported directly into Smart Balance's ERP system. We FTP the orders as they come in to Smart Balance's FTP Server and their programmer wrote a small script that is constantly looking in that folder for new files. When orders are found, the script issues an import command to get them added into Smart Balance's internal systems. Orders now process automatically throughout the day into Smart Balance’s ERP system. Xebec went one step further by incorporating rules-checking to ensure orders meet proper lead times, minimum weights, and correct pricing among other things. When they create invoices once a day, they drop invoice text files to the same FTP Server. ECLynx runs about every 10-15 minutes and checks this invoice folder. If there are new files, it moves them to the ECLynx system, runs them through a custom program to get the data into a format the EDI translator requires, and then translates them into EDI format. These invoices are sent off to Smart Balance's customers, most via EDI Networks and many via AS2 connections.
With the plan in place, Smart Balance gave us the go ahead to start converting its partners starting with those it does the most volume with. So we tackled the partner conversion in 3 batches. We set up a separate VAN mailbox to run all converted partners' EDI through. We tested our maps to be sure that for inbound documents, we were creating text files that would import into Smart Balance's systems properly and on the outbound side we tested our maps to be sure the resulting EDI files matched those Smart Balance was currently sending in production. Once we were happy that everything was looking good, we'd contact the partners and ask them to change the EDI Id so the data would flow through our new mailbox, maps and processes. After a week of working out any small wrinkles, we moved on to the next batch. Within about 2 months we had all the partners moved over and off the old processes. Smart Balance was very happy to have a more efficient, completely streamlined automatic process in place, which frees up their time to concentrate on their core business.
If a problem ever occurs, Smart Balance simply picks up the phone and calls their
designated account manager at Xebec Data. They never have to explain the
services Xebec provides to them, instead their dedicated account manager
already has a working knowledge of their account, and can usually diagnose
and fix the problem over the phone. The level of customer service Xebec
provides, gives Smart Balance confidence that it has a competent, attentive, dedicated
EDI team that is can rely on.
