A new web-based system has increased the speed and accuracy of exchanging business documents with more than 2,000 trading partners, True Value says.

A few years ago, senior management at True Value Co., a hardware cooperative with more than 4,500 independently owned retail stores and thousands of trading partners, set out to improve how the widespread organization managed financial documents and records.

“We saw that there were two things we could do easily and quickly,” says Ellary Kahan, application resource manager. One was to upgrade its financial management software, and the other was to deploy a web-based data integration system designed to improve the speed and accuracy of electronically exchanging documents like purchase orders and invoices with more than 2,000 trading partners, including merchandise suppliers, shipping carriers and banks.

Both steps involved moving software off of the company’s mainframe computer system, which had restricted True Value’s ability to expeditiously exchange business documents with trading partners—and when necessary automatically detect errors and alert a trading partner when it had sent an inaccurate document.

After upgrading its financial management software, True Value decided to improve how it exchanged as many as 10,000 or more documents per day through electronic data interchange, or EDI. It deployed on its own web servers the IBM Sterling B2B Integrator from IBM Corp., which acts as intermediary to receive and transmit documents, alerting True Value and its business partners when a document contain errors. The software also maintains long-term records that can be quickly searched, Kahan says.

The IBM Sterling B2B Integrator also helps to on-board onto the EDI system the 100 new suppliers True Value buys from each year. Although True Value tests document transmissions with new suppliers—and though documents with errors are uncommon from new or veteran suppliers—even a handful of inaccurate documents can cause difficulties and slow operations.

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On a single day last month, for example, True Value processed about 13,000 EDI transactions, with five that contained errors that classified documents as not being in compliance with how True Value needs them prepared. “That’s still a concern,” Kahan says. “And in the past, we’d have to find the non-compliance errors, and call each vendor to explain the error. With this new system, an email with the text of the transaction is automatically sent back to the vendor.”

In some cases, the error could be caused by a True Value buyer when preparing and sending a purchase order, resulting in extra time to re-issue the document.

Finding errors manually, Kahan says, could involve finding something as obscure as a misplaced colon in the middle of a document. Particular text characters or punctuation marks can indicate significant changes in a document, such as the end of a segment of product information. A mark in the wrong place can result in an inaccurately placed order, leading to a search for what might be holding things up.

“In the old system, people would spend a lot of time figuring out what was wrong,” Kahan says. For example, if a purchase order was prepared improperly, a manager would have to call an inventory planner and have him re-send it. “That could take a day,” Kahan says. But with the B2
B Integrator, “now we can re-send it immediately.”

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Under the prior system, it could be difficult if not impossible to find the source of some errors that resulted in misplaced orders. If there was a question about whether True Value had ever sent a particular purchase order, for example, it would take a “time-consuming” process to find an original record of the purchase order, or confirm that it had never been sent. Moreover, the old system only kept documents on record for about a month. “If someone had to go back more than a month to find a purchase order, they’d be out of luck—they could prove it was sent,” Kahan says.

With the new system, the B2B Integrator is designed to keep a two-year history of documents, with a search portal that lets users quickly search by purchase order or invoice number to quickly find a document, he says.

The B2B Integrator, he adds, “is exceeding our expectations and really improved our communications with trading partners.”

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