EDI Customer Case Study

London Drugs, the premier retailer in Western Canada, has integrated its Oracle/Peoplesoft ERP and BizTalk Server infrastructure with TradeLink EDI Management System and EDI services provided by SoftCare EC Inc. for its Scan Based Trading (SBT) initiative. This initiative uses Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) as the key information flow to manage and maintain the SBT business process.

London Drugs commitment is to provide customers with a superior shopping experience, first-rate personal customer service, and innovative products. It is 100% Canadian owned and is focused on local customers' satisfaction. Across Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia, London Drugs' 63 stores employ more than 7000 staff dedicated to providing their customers with a superior shopping experience.

In order to continue achieving this mission, London Drugs Scan Based Trading (SBT) program was developed to support a Direct-Store-Deliveries program where the supplier manages the store inventory and maintains ownership of the inventory until the items are sold at point of sale. London Drugs Scan Based Trading program uses EDI as the key component to synchronize information on store Locations (Organizational Structure EDI 816), Items (Price/Sales Catalog EDI 832), Daily Sales (Product Activity Data EDI 852), Shipments (Ship Note/Manifest EDI 856) Store Receipts (EDI 856 and Receiving Advice EDI 861) and Payments (Remittance Advice EDI 820) between itself and its Scan Based Trading suppliers

London Drugs realized that one of the biggest hurdles to obtaining maximum value of Scan Based Trading is the need for expertise in EDI, business process and Scan Based Trading approaches. This is why they turned to SoftCare.

Scott Riddell, Manager IT Solutions for London Drugs states “We looked at a number of products and selected the TradeLink and VL Trader products from SoftCare. SoftCare’s approach allowed us to interface with our legacy systems and gave our EDI administrators access to the EDI engine without tightly coupling EDI to our legacy systems or elevating the access privileges of our EDI administrators to include these legacy systems and pre-existing Enterprise Application Integration system.”

London Drugs chose TradeLink EDI Management System and SoftCare because they liked SoftCare’s approach of combining, software, consulting and services to provide an all-encompassing solution to implementing Scan Based Trading for them. The first step was to have SoftCare’s Solutions Group work with London Drugs to understand their business requirements for Scan Based Trading and to create company specific EDI implementation guidelines that closely mirror their business processes while ensuring that the information sent also met the needs of their pilot Scan Based Trading Vendor. This process identified and created a “best practices” EDI implementation for synchronization of Locations (EDI 816), Items (EDI 832), Daily Sales (EDI 852), Shipments (EDI 856), Receiving (EDI 861), Taxation (EDI 812) and Payment (EDI 820) between London Drugs and their Scan Based suppliers.

With the new business software installed, the company turned its attention to integrating EDI with their existing business applications.

SoftCare’s Solutions Group worked with London Drugs’ staff to identify what changes were necessary internally to move information to and from its Oracle/Peoplesoft ERP using Microsoft’s BizTalk Server as the conduit to/from TradeLink to meet London Drugs’ Scan Based Trading Initiative needs. The Solutions Group designed the integration formats by reviewing with London Drugs internal staff the needs of Scan Based Trading and then ensured that the resulting EDI documents met the requirements.

Communications Setup and Testing

The next step was to work with London Drugs’ internal staff to determine how to minimize their communications costs. This led to a decision to implement their SBT vendors using direct communications over the Internet (AS2) with TradeLink’s integrated AS2 solution. SoftCare worked with London Drugs to test and implement AS2 communications with their pilot vendor to ensure a smooth communication process was in place. Then SoftCare worked with London Drugs and their pilot SBT vendor in testing the actual business documents to ensure that they met the needs of all parties.

Creating a production environment

Once testing was completed, the final step was to implement a production system to manage the flow of information between London Drugs and their pilot SBT vendor. The Solutions Group implemented the business processes within TradeLink to automate and manage the flow of business documents to/from their back-end Oracle/Peoplesoft ERP to and from their SBT pilot vendor. 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 London Drugs. 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, Scott Riddell, Manager of IT Solutions at London Drugs states:

“Our project came with aggressive timelines. 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. Design in hand, SoftCare worked with us to implement that design into their product. As with anyone’s environment, ours has nuances and we have preferences that SoftCare provided for. We were very happy with the products and services we received from SoftCare. We completed on time and on budget with a solution we are proud of. We are now well into the chain-wide roll-out of the project and it is has been an IT Manager’s dream – extremely quiet”.

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