Solutions

Trade Partner Collaboration

After decades of spending significant money on complex EDI systems, trading partners are still mostly just exchanging transactional information like purchase orders, ship notices, and invoices.

Traditional trading partner systems are rigid and cannot effectively support collaborative planning data like promotions, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR), and vendor-managed inventory (VMI). And, if you've tried to implement a traditional system you've found that it is very costly, takes a long time to implement, and is hard to change. Many companies have attempted to either build portals to handle the exchange of dynamic data or they have tried to push their CRM application(s) out to the trading partner - both methods have seen little or no success. With BCP, trading partners can break down the barriers that limit the exchange of dynamic data so important to trading relationships and turn rigid organizational relationships into flexible, adaptive value chains ready to respond to market and customer shifts.

Trading partners understand that collaboration around key processes like forecasting and promotions has become a critical aspect of their business. No longer can trading partners rely on historical trends to determine what level of product to build. According to research, retailers are likely to lose almost one-half of the intended purchases when a consumer confronts an out-of-stock situation. And, over 60% of customers indicate that promotions drive their decision to buy. The Boardwalk Collaboration Platform offers trading partners an enterprise quality, collaborative solution which leverages a desktop application everyone uses already - Excel - but replaces the error prone and tedious email-based exchange of data with a patented database technology designed specifically to enable cell-level collaboration between multiple users.

Trade Partner Collaboration Challenges

  • Reaching across firewalls and platforms and reconciling different business definitions means manufacturers have little or no visibility into the shared supply chain and suffer from a lack of synchronization
  • Empowered consumers, mounting global competition, and a shifting marketplace means companies need to deploy collaborative technology now to avoid to avoid losing sales opportunites or being driven out of the market
  • Manufacturers need to focus on continuous product innovation to compete and yet existing technologies have yielded sluggish and extended product innovation cycles due to the inability to collaborate between trading partners
  • The lack of a flexible data environment means changes by trading partners are not easily accommodated by other partners which results in. inaccurate and inconsistent product and partner information - ultimately causing inventory issues and costing everyone money

The Boardwalktech Solution: BCP-Driven Trading Partner Collaboration

Boardwalktech has developed a trading partner solutions suite powered by the Boardwalk Collaboration Platform (BCP) including CPFR, VMI, and promotions management. BCP solutions are configurable, template-driven Excel environments that enable two-way exchange of forecast, promotional, inventory, and other planning data between all points within the extended demand and supply chain working collaboratively as an extended trading partner team.

  • Replace process and information silos with collaborative exchanges focused on maximing the bottom line results for the entire extended supply chain
  • BCP lets trading partners accurately align supply with demand on a continuous basis using spreadsheets so they retain the flexibility they’ve grown accustomed to, but they ’re able to exchange data by simply clicking on a button
  • BCP makes it easy to handle continuously evolving business rules for promotions, pricing, availability, and costing information. All this information is easily managed with BCP and changes are automatically distributed to all participants
  • BCP changes “refresh” rather than replace process information as updates are made which makes understanding what’s changed very easy. And, BCP lets you compare data over any period of time which is critical for developing an accurate forecasting environment
  • BCP lets executive management see what’s changing and why and lets them add their own assessment to the information and conduct what-if analysis to determine the impact of any changes on profitability. They are able to do this using a familiar & powerful business process modeling environment they are already familiar and comfortable with—the spreadsheet
  • CP lets you set up a single, secure, shared source of key planning data that can now be made available to all trade partners. This spreadsheet-based data can be integrated with existing backend systems enabling an enterprise quality planning process between all trading partners
  • BCP allows each trading partner to integrate the exchange of dynamic data with their existing transactional systems of record creating a perfect mix of transactional data and dynamic data improving accuracy and the collaborative exchange of information

Benefits of using BCP for Trading Partner Collaboration

  • Synchronizing the supply chain through trade partner collaboration from raw materials to the consumer offers the greatest opportunity to improved supply chain profitability and greater value to the consumer and the trading partners
  • One of the key drivers is gaining an understanding of forecasted channel and end-customer purchases which is essential to realizing higher in-stock levels , increased turns for supply chain participants, and lower supply chain costs.
  • Industry analysts estimate that a stronger collaboration with trade partners and a closer synchronization between demand and supply can reduce inventory levels by up to 25 percent
  • Move from traditional, expensive, and labor-intensive platforms to an open, cost-effective, and highly collaborative environment which everyone already uses today.