Fresca Group’s Fruitful Move to Wesupply’s Edi Managed Service

COVENTRY, 26th November 2013 – Fresca Group Ltd, the UK’s largest independently-owned supplier of fresh produce, has achieved greater visibility and control of their customer ordering process by moving to Wesupply’s B2B platform.

As part of their trading relationship with UK supermarkets, the businesses within Fresca Group have been required to trade electronically for over 10 years – exchanging key business documents, including orders, invoices, ASN’s and receipts via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). As the group expanded, so too did the requirement for EDI. Fresca soon found that they were using a myriad of on-premise EDI solutions – with each division using a different solution.

When the group’s older, unsupported solutions became unreliable and an increasing level of in-house IT resource was required to maintain them, it was quickly recognised that Fresca businesses could not afford for EDI issues to impact their customer service. The decision was subsequently made to look for a group-wide EDI solution that was delivered as a fully managed EDI service.

“The decision was made to move to a fully managed EDI service to ensure the continued delivery of a consistently high level of service to our customers. Following a rigorous selection process, we chose Wesupply for its tried and tested managed service that would allow us to focus on our core business.” said Jason King, Senior Systems Analyst at Fresca Group. “Wesupply’s experience in transitioning clients from an existing on premise solution was a key factor in our decision and Wesupply were able to offer real life examples of migrating similar companies onto its platform.”

Fresca moved to Wesupply’s fully managed EDI service, OneTimeTM, to communicate more effectively with its customers, improve visibility of supply chain information, reduce the drain on internal resources, and increase the speed of responding to changing customer requirements. The scope of the project was to transition the purchase order management process with 11 key customers from the company’s incumbent EDI solutions to the Wesupply platform.

Wesupply’s implementation specialists handled the complete on boarding process – including mapping, testing and training – migrating one trading partner at a time to the Wesupply platform. As with all EDI projects that involve a transition from one solution to another, it was imperative that a minimal risk approach was taken. As part of the fully managed service delivered by Wesupply this included a period of hyper care managed by a dedicated team during and after the transition to ensure there were no disruptions to service.

“With companies such as Sainsbury’s amongst its client base we felt confident that Wesupply had the knowledge and expertise to on-board a company of our size and stature and were sensitive to our apprehension in switching providers.” added King.

The transition from numerous on-premise EDI solutions to Wesupply’s fully managed EDI service has provided Fresca with a stable, scalable platform for future growth without the risk of IT purchases, maintenance costs and upgrade issues. The companies benefit from Wesupply’s managed service team who look after the day-to-day running and change management on their behalf, allowing Fresca’s IT department to focus on other key initiatives, whilst still having the ability to respond quickly and efficiently to customer requirements.

The fresh produce sector is a particularly fast moving and demanding environment, therefore accurate and efficient electronic trading is essential. Fresca businesses need to ensure their products are processed and supplied within hours and cannot afford for order processing errors and delays to occur. The benefit to Fresca of Wesupply’s EDI service is that in addition to the automated alerts that are available in Wesupply’s EDI solution, the Wesupply team pro-actively monitor the platform for additional message validation failures and errors. Where possible an immediate fix is implemented, which means that in many cases issues are resolved before they even reach Fresca. A 24 x7 help desk is also available to Fresca and its customers should issues arise.

“With Wesupply clients including both suppliers and retailers Wesupply have an excellent understanding of both sides of the supply chain.” said Ben Holmes, Sales Executive at Wesupply. “This full ‘end to end’ involvement enabled the on-boarding of all Fresca EDI partners in a timely and planned process and continues to provide Fresca businesses with improved levels of visibility and efficiency across their customer facing supply chain.”

About Wesupply
Wesupply Limited provides a fully managed and outsourced electronic business-to-business integration service, using a unique approach that maximises supply chain collaboration between independent organisations. This approach has consistently helped our customers secure tangible operational cost savings along with improved customer service, since the business was founded in 1999. Companies across all industries, including Retail, Building, CPG, Energy and Manufacturing rely on Wesupply to manage business-critical information flows for their extended supply chain processes.

About Fresca Group
Tracing its history back to Covent Garden Market in 1874, Fresca Group remains focused on the UK fresh produce market. The company has grown to become the UK’s largest privately-owned business of its kind, with some £400m in annual sales across the constituent businesses in the group.
Fresca businesses work to procure, import, ripen, pack and distribute many thousands of pallets of fruit and vegetables every year to customers in multiple retailers and wholesalers nationwide.

For further information about Fresca Group and its businesses, visit www.frescagroup.co.uk