Supermarket giant Woolworths, which has more than 1400 stores serving 22 million customers a week, worked with GS1 Australia, MessageXchange, and Colladium to develop a new solution for the efficient onboarding of suppliers.
Woolworths has a set of message implementation guidelines (MIGs) that define how suppliers should trade electronically with them via EDI (electronic data interchange).
The guidelines stipulate what type of document, or message, suppliers need to use, be it purchase orders, purchase order responses, purchase order changes, advanced shipping notices, and invoices. It also outlines when to use them, the structure, and business rules of each message.
But as an increasing number of suppliers started to choose EDI to trade with Woolworths electronically, onboarding suppliers to EDI – and ensuring their documentation complied with the MIGs – with the existing resources was becoming a challenge for the retailer’s eBusiness team.
Woolworths eBusiness lead Derong Yu said the current system was cumbersome.
“To support our suppliers, we would raise test purchase orders and send them to the suppliers. The suppliers would need to send back messages, like a purchase order response or an invoice for validation. If the messages failed, we would check the message and provide specific feedback to the suppliers. The suppliers would then need to make changes on their end and retest it again.
“It involved a lot of back-and-forth and could take weeks or even months to complete the end-to-end EDI accreditation testing,” Yu explained.
Finding the solution
GS1 Australia is a long-time partner with Woolworths Group and works closely with its eBusiness team.
To develop an electronic EDI certification and self-testing service (EDI Certify), GS1 Australia collaborated with its alliance partner, cloud B2B integration service provider, MessageXchange, and business network platform for collaboration and trade, Colladium.
The existing relationship between GS1 and Woolworths provided a strong foundation for the project.
“We trust GS1 and we know they would partner with the right provider to get this solution delivered”, Yu said.
“We saw this as a way to enhance our suppliers’ EDI onboarding experience and bring real efficiencies to our EDI accreditation process.”
It was a team effort between the three businesses to work out a streamlined process for suppliers and design the EDI Certify solution accordingly.
It was based on the current EDI documents and other business requirements necessary for working with Woolworths. It included numerous scenarios such as accepting, rejecting or changing orders, fully or partially shipping orders, invoicing, and checking logistics labels.
The MessageXchange and Colladium teams configured the EDI Certify system to guide suppliers through the Woolworths EDI self-certification process.
A key feature was enabling suppliers to generate an order with supplier-specific details such as vendor number and products, as well as validate suppliers’ outgoing messages for Woolworths’ required scenarios with real time feedback.
Most importantly, the processes simulated real-life scenarios.
Woolworths also added in other documentation including labelling guidelines, so that suppliers would have all the information they require, in context, and at the time that they need it.
The end result
With the new EDI Certify service, suppliers are now able to generate EDI purchase orders based on the information they input, self-test their messages to Woolworths anytime to get all issues identified upfront. Once the issues are fixed, they can retest messages without relying on Woolworths eBusiness team.
“The EDI self-certification gives us the confidence that the suppliers are ready when it comes time for the end-to-end EDI accreditation testing and onboarding to our live systems,” said Yu.
“We’ve seen the quality of EDI messages during the end-to-end testing is now much better and the EDI accreditation testing process is smooth.”
Woolworths has also seen major efficiencies in their end-to-end testing process – what sometimes took weeks or months, now takes days.
