EDI solution in the cloud for PGV Austria

A positive shock, is that even possible?

It is, and it happened during the successful migration at PGV Austria perfor­med by EDITEL. The client had “shockingly“ little involvement in the process.

Every year, PGV Austria, a magazi­ne and newspaper distributor, deli­vers approximately 5,250 publications from 290 different publishers to some 8,400 retailers. To make things even more complex, detailed coordination is key to determine when, where, and how long a certain newspaper or ma­gazine is available at the point of sale (POS). Sophisticated logistics proces­ses must be in place to achieve that. For more than 20 years, these have been handled exclusively via Electro­nic Data Interchange using eXite, the EDI platform by EDITEL. The platform still uses the EDI standard (EANCOM) developed by GS1 Austria in 1996, which caters specifically to the needs of newspaper and magazine distributors.

The new EDI solution in the cloud for PGV Austria

A locally installed converter was used to do the data conversion from the in-house format to the EDIFACT format. The data conversion procedure was overhau­led during a process update last year. By switching to a future-proof outsourcing solution, the company wanted to free resources and achieve higher system stability. PGV Austria trusted the exper­tise of its long-standing EDI partner EDITEL for both data migration and the implementation and operation of the new cloud solution.

500,000 transactions per month

This is no easy feat, partially because the entire migration had to be perfor­med during ongoing operations and EDITEL worked live in the retailer‘s real-time system. In addition, this pro­ject involved significant amounts of data, which amounted to almost 500,000 transactions per month. After an in-depth analysis, EDITEL focused on one thing: testing, testing, and more testing, until the final result was a smooth process that worked 100% of the time. EDITEL successfully rea­ched this goal, and the client is very satisfied with the results:

“We owe the smooth transition first and foremost to the extraordinary dedication of EDITEL and our excellent collaborati­on with them,” said Gerhard Royer-Bin­der, the IT director of PGV Austria. It is quite fitting that Andreas Wieder, the EDI manager at PGV Austria, ironical­ly described the entire migration pro­cess as a “true positive shock, in the sense that there was ultimately nothing for us to do.” It is safe to assume that no one was particularly upset by this turn of events.

How magazines get to the supermarket