Situation
Created in 1968, Uni-Select still has the same corporate vision that united the first 12 businessmen to start the buying group: develop optimal means of distribution for motor vehicle replacement parts, tools, equipment and accessories. With over 2,000 jobber members across North America, Uni-Select is now a powerhouse in its industry with impressive annual growth rates. As a distributor, Uni-Select is wedged between suppliers and customers who want toconduct electronic transactions.
Business Challenge
Back in 2003, Uni-Select was doing EDI on its own, using VAN services, FTP, proprietary interfaces and an internal mapping tool – and throwing tons of resources at the problem. Clearly there had to be a better way of doing things. The complex environment created over the years was difficult to manage, lacked flexibility and was definitely not delivering the expected benefits from automation. In fact, Uni-Select was mostly sending documents to its trading partners and not receiving much of anything. The old platform was also producing a series of reports that the legacy internal system was not providing.
As part of its corporate objective to foster fruitful relationships with suppliers, Uni-Select was looking into connecting more suppliers for the exchange of a larger set of documents. However, most of the IT staff had been recently outsourced and resources within line of business were busy with other priority projects. Also, information about suppliers in terms of their EDI capabilities was outdated or not available.
At the same time, Merchandising executives were caught with sales reporting issues with certain large banner customers and needed help recuperating data from their members.
Solution Components
InterTrade was selected in early 2004 as Uni-Select’s network. The first step consisted in carrying over Uni-Select’s complex transport infrastructure – from the VAN network connections with suppliers, FTP connections with customers and members – and replicating the mapping environment, including the numerous custom reports that were generated by the legacy infrastructure. The end solution included connections to suppliers, customers and some of Uni-Select’s distribution centre network across Canada to exchange various electronic documents. When Corporate Purchasing Vice-President Michel Laverdure decided to pursue integration of more documents with suppliers and, especially, further compliance amongst vendors, he had with very little information with which to assess the issue. InterTrade was asked to perform a vendor survey to understand vendors’ EDI capabilities. Once the results were in, InterTrade was asked to coordinate the connection, document testing and validation for vendors that were EDI ready. InterTrade also performed a revamp of EDI guidelines with process review sessions with Uni-Select Logistics, Accounting and Purchasing staff to reflect business process rules in the EDI documents. On the commercial front, the merchandising group was facing an information crunch that required them to gather sales data from jobber members. Reported sales from jobbers were channeled through InterTrade, establishing the infrastructure for further document exchanges between Uni-Select and its members.
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Benefits
As part of its IT outsourcing strategy, Uni-Select greatly benefited from the partnership with InterTrade by reducing its out-of-pocket expenses to exchange electronic documents while focusing IT resources on core business projects. Benefits from various efforts include:
A lower total cost to connect vendors, distribution centers and customers freed up internal resources to work on core projects. EDI outsourcing also allowed Uni-Select to benefit from a state-of-the-art platform able to connect with all widely used communications protocols over various data formats. On-boarding services by InterTrade allowed Uni-Select resources to focus on their business while more vendors
and more documents were being activated. Uni-Select realized that outsourcing the coordination of vendor connections and tests was less expensive than trying to do it internally and resulted in quicker implementation at lower cost. Uni-Select was also able to leverage the InterTrade platform to gather its sales information from jobbers in order to meet reporting and billing commitments with large corporate and banner customers.
The next steps
Uni-Select and InterTrade have prepared the way for the future in completing the vendor EDI compliance program. The technical analysis required to build a vendor portal for the exchange of Purchase Orders, Advance Shipment Notices and Invoices has been completed. Deployment of the vendor on-boarding campaign, testing of documents and training of vendors on the portal will be the next steps. Uni-Select is still aiming at getting all significant vendors up on EDI as soon as possible.
Today jobbers are sending Purchase Orders through various proprietary protocols and formats, some rather old and difficult to maintain. Uni-Select is looking into the possibility of getting rid of the old infrastructure and leveraging the InterTrade platform to trade further documents with members.
In parallel, Uni-Select is integrating its U.S. operations from an IT perspective. InterTrade is now setting up the U.S. division to efficiently trade with its vendors and customers through a standard set of EDI transactions.
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