SPAR PDF orders
Click to order
Every day, more than 600 business partners, ranging from large manufacturers to very small producers, deliver their products to the eight large retail warehouses and 1,600 Austrian stores (INTERSPAR, EUROSPAR, SPAR, SPAR Gourmet) operated by the retail company SPAR.
This includes the transmission of roughly 6 million EDI transactions, which ensure that shelves are stocked with myriad products at all times. It would be unthinkable to handle these highly complex logistics processes with paper documents or even via fax.
This is one of the reasons why SPAR has always strived for swift and user-friendly EDI connections. Case in point: orders to very small producers abroad are sent as PDFs. A simple e-mail with a link to the PDF order is used. This has the advantage that SPAR will receive confirmation as soon as the supplier has clicked on the link so that SPAR will know that the order has been received.
On the technical side, data at SPAR leaves the company as usual in EDIFACT format (ORDERS) and is then converted to PDF format by EDITEL.
“Sending simple order e-mails resulted in a lot of room for error and in some cases, due to a lack of order confirmations, orders got lost somewhere along the way. Thanks to this solution developed in collaboration with our EDI service provider of many years, EDTEL, the error rate is now almost zero,” explained Daniel Schuster, head of e-purchasing/ B2B projects at SPAR.
Klaus Schaffer, product manager at EDITEL, added: “We strive to develop the right solution for SPAR and every one of their EDI partners, in an effort of making digital data flows run just as smoothly as physical flows of merchandise”
For Daniel Schuster, the full automation of the process, from electronic orders to electronic despatch advices (DESADV) and from there to electronic invoices (INVOIC), is still a priority: “Our goal at SPAR is and remains to have fully integrated EDI because this is the only way of fully leveraging the benefits of this technology now and in the future,” he said.
