EDI Customer Case Study - Listo Products Ltd.

Listo Products a supplier of premium plastic parts has integrated its SYSPRO ERP with the TradeLink EDI Management System and EDI services provided by SoftCare EC Inc. for its largest Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) enabled retailer clients.

Listo Products Ltd. started in 1948, as an organization making various plastic components and now is solely focused on the manufacture of premium resin planters to their retail customers in all regions of Canada, the United States and overseas markets.

Listo was faced with the issue of WAL*MART requiring a switch in their EDI documents form version 004030 to 005010. Their existing EDI solution was manually intensive, prone to error and lacked a complete and comprehensive audit. In addition, the process to add new trading partners was not timely, expensive and was not documented as a single outside consultant controlled the entire process to add new trading partners. This led them to look for alternative solutions that could provide the necessary changes while maintaining proper documentation and was maintainable in-house. This led them to SoftCare.

Listo chose SoftCare and its TradeLink EDI Management System because they liked their approach to combining software, consulting and services to provide an all-encompassing solution to implementing EDI for them. Additionally, they were impressed by SoftCare’s focus on EDI, the business processes to support EDI and their open standards based approach to integration to their SYSPRO ERP.

The first implementation phase was to plan out the hardware and software requirements. It was determined that TradeLink and VL Trader (for AS2 communications) was to be installed on a Windows Server machine. This approach was chosen to ensure the security of information and systems. As communications for all Trading Partners was to be via the Internet (using the AS2 communications protocol), the initial test of AS2 communications was tested with SoftCare’s AS2 communications hub. This approach ensured that all firewall issues were clarified prior to testing with a customer.

Integrating Business Systems to Create a Production Environment

The next step was to have SoftCare’s Solutions Group work with Listo to understand their business requirements for EDI with WAL*MART specific to Listo. This process identified and created a “best practices” EDI implementation for receipt and integration of Purchase Orders (EDI 850) and export and transmission of Invoices (EDI 810) from their SYSPRO ERP to WAL*MART. The initial testing was to work on the outbound business process to move Invoices to WAL*MART. This process included:

Upon completion of the testing of the outbound process, the next step was to design and test the business process to move WAL*MART Purchase Orders into Listo’s SYSPRO ERP. This process included:

The Solutions Group then implemented the business processes within TradeLink to automate and manage the flow of business documents to/from their back-end SYSPRO ERP to and from WAL*MART. In the initial testing phase, they relied on TradeLink’s “operations dashboard” and “alert” system, to identify problems with incoming or outgoing business documents and to quickly “resolve” problems with the movement of business documents to/from Listo. Once implemented, TradeLink’s superior audit system was used to manage day-to-day operations of the systems, ensuring a smooth and seamless transfer of information.

Commenting on the overall project, Ross Graham, Manager of IT Solutions at Listo Products states:

“With SoftCare’s assistance in providing best practices for business to business interchange and consultative services, our solution design was completed quickly, accurately, and with a flexibility that will serve us well into the future ”.

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