Supplier Onboarding – ILVA’s

ILVA is a well-known Danish brand in furniture and home decor, and if you visit their furniture stores, they have a large selection of sofas, dining tables, chairs, garden furniture, and home accessories. It all started more than 60 years ago when Jørgen Linde opened the store J.L. Furniture in Vanløse. In 1977, the store changed its name to ILVA, and more stores were added over time. In 2019, ILVA and IDEmøbler were merged under the name ILVA. Today, ILVA has 42 furniture stores throughout Denmark and 8 in other countries. The company employs 900 people and has an annual turnover of 1.7 billion Danish kroner. ILVA is a large company, and every day a large number of business documents are both sent and received.

In connection with the merger of IDEmøbler and ILVA, ILVA chose to upgrade their ERP system to Microsoft Dynamics AX. At the same time, they also wanted to streamline their data. ILVA had 125,000 annual purchase lines and 220 suppliers. 25 of these suppliers exchanged EDI with ILVA, and the remaining 195 suppliers exchanged business documents via both email and PDF. ILVA exchanged more than 5,000 EDI documents per month (including orders, order confirmations, and invoices) with their approximately 25 suppliers in more than 6 different countries. With the desire to streamline and streamline this process, the company decided to investigate measures that could reduce their manual business processes. This resulted in a lot of administrative work for ILVA, and they had six full-time employees dedicated to administration. Their work involved updating delivery information in ILVA’s ERP system and following up on missing delivery information from suppliers. ILVA wanted to remove the heavy manual processes. To achieve this, they chose to expand their EDI solution and outsource all their EDI to TrueCommerce.

EDI Requirements

It was important for ILVA that their EDI solution included onboarding of all their suppliers. At the same time, it should be a solution that had minimal requirements for development resources internally in ILVA. ILVA has many suppliers who deliver a small number of specific items to them and who do not use EDI. In addition, ILVA also has many large suppliers who are connected to EDI. Therefore, it was essential for ILVA that the EDI solution they chose could handle and support all their customers – regardless of size and whether they used EDI or not.

Supplier Onboarding and ILVA Supplier Portal

ILVA started this project with a vision of bringing all their suppliers onto the same platform, so they only had to maintain one platform, one administration, and one support. One of the priorities was to ensure that it would not be too demanding and complicated for their suppliers. At the same time, it shouldn’t require too much from ILVA internally. Therefore, the solution should include an onboarding program that makes it easy for ILVA to onboard suppliers. As part of their supplier onboarding, ILVA has received a portal solution for their suppliers who are not connected to EDI. They use this portal for their smaller suppliers or to get new suppliers on board in just a few days. ILVA now has an onboarding solution for its suppliers.

When ILVA gets a new supplier, they send a “one-pager” to be used with their standard contract. When the contract is signed, the supplier fills out a series of information which is then sent to TrueCommerce. Next, TrueCommerce onboards the supplier, and within a short time, they are ready to exchange EDI with ILVA.

ILVA Achieves Resource Release to Other Important Business Areas

After two years, ILVA has achieved supplier onboarding and has onboarded over 220 suppliers. All their suppliers now send and receive business documents via EDI, freeing ILVA from receiving orders via a mix of EDI, email, and PDF. Now, ILVA’s 125,000 purchase order lines are managed by two full-time employees who spend half their time on other tasks. Overall, ILVA has experienced a reduction in work hours of over 80%. They have thus released many internal resources that can now be used for other important IT priorities. In addition to achieving a significant reduction in work hours, ILVA has also improved data quality. Kim Nisted, Purchasing Manager at ILVA, says: “It’s hard to quantify data quality, but there is no doubt that data quality has increased as we and our suppliers no longer have to enter it manually, where mistakes can easily occur.”

Although ILVA has outsourced and automated most of their EDI, it is still essential for them to have transparency in their business processes. ILVA would like to be able to see if there are any deviations in delivery times from their suppliers. In case of a delayed delivery, ILVA must find alternatives so that customers still receive their goods.

Choice of Formats Had Advantages and Disadvantages

To make onboarding as easy as possible for suppliers, ILVA chose to support all the different formats that their suppliers wanted to use. Initially, this ensured a quick and smooth transition and the least possible change in the processes at the suppliers’ end. It has worked well for ILVA, and they now have a broad portfolio of suppliers on different formats. However, some formats will not be supported by EDI in the future, so some of ILVA’s suppliers will have to be onboarded again. This could have been avoided with a more stringent selection of formats that the EDI solution should support.

Advice from ILVA

During the supplier onboarding project, ILVA gained a lot of experience in running a large IT project together with their many suppliers. They have compiled the most important of ILVA’s experiences here so that you can become wiser before your next IT project

Communication with Suppliers

When onboarding a supplier, there are different departments within the supplier that need to be involved in the project. When ILVA started their project, they communicated individually with the different departments within the suppliers. This included commercial, operational, and technical departments. This resulted in a lengthy process with several challenges. Therefore, ILVA chose to communicate with all departments within the suppliers from the start of the onboarding process. Kim Nisted says the following: “It has proven to be a good time investment, as everyone has been informed about what they need to go through and who is responsible for what. The interfaces are not always 100% the same, but this approach has helped to speed up the process.”