Seafresh Group: EDI Case Study

Seafresh Group Increases Productivity, Efficiency and Accuracy with TrueCommerce’s Integrated EDI Solution

As a forward-thinking company who places continual improvement at the core of its operations, Seafresh Group sought to move beyond EDI compliance, by streamlining its order to cash processes with a fully integrated and automated EDI solution. Seafresh Group chose to outsource its EDI requirements to TrueCommerce, for a scalable solution that would meet the company’s requirements as they continue to grow. The company have achieved greater productivity, efficiency and accuracy whilst freeing up resources.

Background and Challenges

Seafresh Group is a leading seafood company with over 30 years of experience in the global seafood market. Working with global retailers and food service businesses, Seafresh Group provide the highest quality and responsibly sourced seafood at the best value.

Seafresh Group’s customers include Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Marks and Spencer. As part of its customers trading requirements, Seafresh Group has been trading via EDI for many years – exchanging key business documents electronically, including orders, invoices and ASN’s.

A key element of the culture at Seafresh Group is a strong belief in always being able to improve the quality of the products and services they provide. Keeping tight control over the supply chain plays a crucial role in ensuring that Seafresh Group supply safe, clean and consistently better tasting seafood.  When system and service issues with the company’s incumbent onpremise EDI solution threatened to affect customer service levels, the decision was made to look for an alternative provider.

“The perishable nature of our products means that supply chain errors can be extremely damaging and costly. In our line of business there is no room for error and it’s essential that we have an EDI platform that we can trust.”

Tim Hunter, Group Head of IT at Seafresh Group

More Connected

As a company that was growing rapidly, the first priority for Seafresh Group was to comply with its customers EDI requirements. Seafresh Group initially migrated across to the TrueCommerce web EDI solution, using the portal to receive and acknowledge orders, create and send ASN’s and SSCC pallet labels, and create and send invoices. The solution enabled Seafresh Group to migrate from its existing unstable solution quickly and easily, with no investment required in software or hardware.

“The TrueCommerce portal was great when we didn’t have an ERP solution or the time to stop and think about a more joined up approach. However, when I joined the business, I saw an opportunity to build upon the benefits we had seen since we moved to TrueCommerce through automation and integration,” said Tim Hunter. “We wanted to eliminate the risk of human error and eliminate the time and effort that was being wasted in rekeying and cross referencing data, which were required due to the disconnect between our new ERP system and the information being sent from our customers through the TrueCommerce portal. Ultimately, it’s important that our team focuses on activities that add maximum value and this wasn’t the case.”

The decision was subsequently made to integrate the TrueCommerce EDI solution with the company’s Oracle ERP system and WMS solution.

“An implementation like this is not without its problems and we experienced a number of delays due to changing priorities on our side, however the TrueCommerce team were very patient and helped us work through any problems,” said Tim Hunter.

More Supported

Since integrating EDI with its back office systems, Seafresh Group has benefitted from significant productivity and efficiency benefits. The company now has a stable and scalable electronic trading solution that maximises efficiency and customer service levels.

“We’ve seen a reduction in risk by removing manual, errorprone processes, and an opportunity to refocus the team on tasks that can add value to the business as we continue to grow,” said Tim Hunter. “The online portal also makes troubleshooting issues and testing very flexible and we get great visibility of messages flowing in and out of the business”.

Seafresh Group benefit from the TrueCommerce managed service model, which includes specialist teams that look after the onboarding of customers on the company’s behalf and on-going support, including the pro-active monitoring of the TrueCommerce platform for message validation errors.

“Ultimately, seafood is our area of expertise, not EDI, which is where TrueCommerce come in,” said Tim Hunter. “Support is a key element of the TrueCommerce service. In August, we needed a high priority change making to the order messages for one of our customers, with only a few days’ notice. TrueCommerce understood the importance of this to us, and turned the work around in time to meet our deadline.”

More Prepared for What’s Next

As a fully scalable solution, the TrueCommerce managed service will enable Seafresh Group to add functionality as and when required.

“Following the success of integrating orders, invoices and ASN’s, with our back office systems, we are looking to build upon this to further reduce manual processes,” said Tim Hunter. “We are currently implementing a new warehouse management system, and once this is completed we’ll be looking at EPOD integration, as currently, our finance department manually match these against the invoices. The allocation of remittances is another area we will be looking at.”

Benefits

• Fully automated and integrated solution eliminates manual, error prone processes
• Significant operational savings with the reallocation of internal resources
• Quick and easy onboarding of new customers
• Full scalability supports continued growth

“We’ve seen a reduction in risk by removing manual, error-prone processes, and an opportunity to refocus the team on tasks that can add value to the business as we continue to grow.”

Tim Hunter, Group Head of IT Seafresh Group