The Vaillant Group: EDI Case Study

As one of Europe’s leading heating technology manufacturers, Vaillant had been trading electronically with its customers, leading builders’ merchants and DIY retailers, for a number of years using an on-premise EDI solution that was hosted and managed internally. Although the legacy solution enabled Vaillant to benefit from the removal of manual, paper-based processes whilst complying with its customers’ EDI requirements, the company recognized that the solution wasn’t scalable and decided to look for alternative solutions that would meet both its current and future EDI requirements.

“At Vaillant ‘thinking ahead’ is a culture which is embraced and we continually look for ways to improve the efficiency of our systems and processes.” said Kris Smith, Ecommerce Trading Manager at The Vaillant Group. “As our customers’ EDI requirements continued to grow, managing them became more complex and required increasing amounts of internal resources. To ensure that we had a solution that would support future growth and enable us to continue delivering the highest level of service to our customers, something which is synonymous with the Vaillant brand, the decision was made to move to a specialist, outsourced EDI provider.”

With previous experience of TrueCommerce’s EDI managed service through its trading relationship with leading Plumbers Merchant Graham, a TrueCommerce client, Vaillant decided to consolidate all its EDI requirements on to TrueCommerce’s EDI platform.

“TrueCommerce’s client base and expertise in the building sector gave us the confidence that our requirements would be met without any disruption to our business or that of our customers. In fact TrueCommerce already had connections to most, if not all of our major customers.” said Kris Smith. “As a company who understands the importance of customer service, we were also impressed with the level of service we received even as just a supplier to one of TrueCommerce’s clients.

Vaillant needed a solution that would automate the exchange of IDoc messages directly to/from its SAP system and TrueCommerce’s successful track record of integrating seamlessly with SAP ensured that the integration for Vaillant was painless.”

TrueCommerce’s Implementation Services team managed the implementation and on-boarding process as part of TrueCommerce’s overall managed service – from communicating with Vaillant’s customers regarding their requirements and availability, to creating maps, and testing connections. Once the implementation was completed, TrueCommerce’s Managed Service team took over the responsibility of managing the day-to-day service, including the provision of support to both Vaillant and its customers.

“A key element of the service we offer our clients is the proactive monitoring of system availability, message delivery and message validation errors, to ensure all documents are processed and delivered successfully.” Said Jerry Quinn, Sales Director at TrueCommerce.

“If issues occur and an immediate resolution is not available our Managed Service team escalate it to our client and assist them in resolving the issue.”

Vaillant now trades with all of its major customers electronically on the TrueCommerce network, exchanging orders, invoices, acknowledgments and ASN’s on a daily basis.

In addition to its major customers, in 2013 TrueCommerce added connectivity to Vaillant’s new web shop (www.vaillantstore.co.uk) to the TrueCommerce network. All electronic orders are now processed and validated on the TrueCommerce platform for onward delivery to Vaillant’s SAP system, providing real-time visibility of all electronic orders on one single platform.

“Following the recent web shop project that TrueCommerce completed for us, we are now processing 82% of our total order value electronically and envisage this growing in the future as more companies move to EDI.” said Kris Smith. “The scalability of the TrueCommerce service allows us to respond quickly and easily to additional customer requests.”

In addition to a more efficient and streamlined supply chain, Vaillant have also benefited from cost savings since moving to TrueCommerce. As TrueCommerce’s EDI solution is completely outsourced, Vaillant have no hardware, software or maintenance requirements saving the company money, whilst also enabling internal resource to be redeployed to other areas of the business. Also, as TrueCommerce’s pricing model is a fixed annual fee, Vaillant no longer need to worry about costly message volume fees based on the number of transactions they process.

“TrueCommerce are a highly valued and trusted partner and the fact that Vaillant have been a TrueCommerce client for almost 10 years really speaks for itself.” said Kris Smith. “The reliability of the TrueCommerce service is first class and the proactive approach of the support team and simple pricing model make TrueCommerce an easy company to work with.”

“With a client retention rate of over 98%, TrueCommerce prides itself on the level of service we offer our clients. We are therefore delighted that clients such as Vaillant see us as a partner as opposed to just a solution provider.” said Jerry Quinn. “We look forward to working with Vaillant in the future as the company continues to grow.”