Detailed Results & Business Impact
Excellent service for both new and old customers
Regal Art is growing its EDI order volume at a planned, steady pace.
Regal Art initially built its business serving small garden and gift stores, many of which have been customers for decades. As they bring on bigger retail customers, Regal Art wants to ensure that those longstanding relationships with smaller retailers remain intact and thriving.
“We’re slowly but surely adding more and more EDI trading partners,” Ms. Carroll explains. From the very beginning we added 4 large retailers and then an additional 3 large retailers within the first 8 months of integration.
The new EDI trading partners’ onboarding has been very smooth, and deadlines have never been an issue. “Often retailers are already setup with a TrueCommerce trading partner map,” states Ms. Carroll. “In that case, we don’t even have to ask the customer for specs or download them from a website.”
The TrueCommerce vast industry footprint was an additional benefit.
“We’ve had trading partners tell us, ‘Oh, you’re doing EDI with TrueCommerce—you don’t even need to do any testing.’ This makes bringing on more than one new trading partner at the same time very easy,” says Ms. Carroll.
With comprehensive automation and integration with Dynamics GP, “Nobody has to think about EDI,” concludes Ms. Carroll. “That just frees up more time for us to bring new EDI trading partners onboard. The ease of the system and the seamless integration is so user-friendly. Business users who are responsible for day-to-day interactions with trading partners and our 3PL can use EDI with very little training from us.”
Improved support for Third-Party Logistics
Regal Art leverages TrueCommerce EDI for Dynamics GP to automate key transactions with its 3PL.
Regal Art does not maintain its own warehouse; they rely on a third-party logistics (3PL) provider. To optimize supply chain management and streamline fulfillment end-to-end, the distributor takes advantage of TrueCommerce’s integrated warehouse/3PL support for Dynamics GP, an add-on module that supports two key warehouse documents:
- The outbound warehouse shipping order (940), which can be processed automatically from a sales order in Dynamics GP
- The inbound warehouse shipping advice (945), which can automatically create a delivery in Dynamics GP.
Further, Regal Art uses the EDI 945 to automatically develop the Advance Ship Notice (ASN/856)—giving them the ability to perform a quick turnaround and immediately send notifications to customers.
“We setup our 3PL in TrueCommerce EDI as if they were a trading partner, to facilitate sending orders back-and-forth,” clarifies Ms. Carroll. “The 3PL fulfills and sends the 945 to us immediately, which allows us to send an ASN and invoice in real time. All of the EDI transactions are integrated with Dynamics GP.”
Getting more value from EDI investments
The TrueCommerce Scheduler add-on improves efficiency even more.
Regal Art also takes advantage of the TrueCommerce Scheduler add-on, which automatically executes everyday tasks like importing and exporting EDI documents to and from Dynamics GP, based on predefined parameters. “We setup certain documents to go in and out of Dynamics GP without us even having to login and click on import and export.” Ms. Carroll emphasizes. “It’s a wonderful time-saver.”
Ms. Carroll explains that, with the TrueCommerce Scheduler, “When we have an order that we need our 3PL to ship, we just drop it into the correct batch ID in Dynamics GP and we don’t have to think about it anymore after that.”
EDI 945 documents processing was also simplified. “When the EDI 945 documents come back to us from our 3PL, they flow through TrueCommerce. The Scheduler then exports them automatically from the EDI system to Dynamics GP. At that point we know right away that the order has shipped. It’s very hands-off and flows really well,” summarizes Ms. Carroll.
Efficiency drives ROI
The efficiency of integrated EDI and TrueCommerce Support frees up time and resources for strategic efforts.
From Ms. Carroll’s point of view, “Support should be all about ease of communication and getting resolution as easily as possible. Everybody I’ve spoken with at TrueCommerce has been knowledgeable and helpful.”
ROI was both fast and significant.
“EDI paid for itself within three to six months. If we didn’t have TrueCommerce EDI we’d need to hire two or three additional staff, minimum,” states Ms. Carroll.