This
is the third part of our
series on trading partner
portals. If you missed part
I or part
II read
that before continuing.
In the
first two parts of our
series on trading partner
portals we discussed the
limitations as well as
some positive aspects.
In this third and final
part we want to discuss
how your organization can
dramatically improve the
efficiency of your POS
and EDI 852 data analysis.
The
most efficient way to handle
multiple trading partner
portals is to first understand
they serve two distinct
purposes (1) communication
of vendor compliance information
and (2) providing POS or
852 data. There are numerous
services available which
monitor trading partner
portals and supply vendors
with automated announcement
of compliance changes.
These services are valuable
and worth investigating.
You might consider Trading
Partners Collaboration as
one good resource. Or vendor
compliance as
another resource.
When it
comes to data analysis the
best approach is to subscribe
to a data analysis service
which can automate the daily
or weekly pull of data from
all your trading partner
portals. The service should
be capable of automating
this process and extracting
the data to their database.
In addition to the POS and
852 data these services should
provide the ability to upload
an item master file. The
item master file should match
the UPC supplied in the POS
and 852 data to your internal
SKU and description. This
provides a much more rich
analysis and reporting environment
for business users. The analysis
and reporting tool should
also provide simple methods
of completing sorting, filtering,
exception highlighting, and
exporting of data.
Many
vendors we talk to have
not fully considered tools
to automate the analysis
of POS data. They are working
in each of their customers
portals or manipulating
data in a spreadsheet.
This is time consuming
and inefficient. Improve
your processes and consider
a service which
can provide item and store
level analysis without
manually gathering data
from the trading partner
portals or manipulating
data.
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