What do Glastonbury, Regatta, Logistics Manager & Inovis have in common?

1 July 2009

81629268MC046_First_Fans_ArGlasto has come and gone – tents as far as the eye can see and outdoor equipment  in abundance.  Chances are the folk at Glastonbury stopped off at Regatta the leading outdoor equipment brand to stock up on Festival must haves!

Regatta, the UK’s leading outdoor equipment supplier, today announced that it has selected Inovis to improve the exchange of sales order data with retailers. Inovis TrustedLink® i series software simplifies Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) communications to support the company’s European operations in more than 30 countries.

Logistics Manager picked up on the story straight away – they are quick off the mark!

If you want to know more – then have a browse of the Regatta case study

RegattaLogo-Large

And that is what they all have in common…!


Outsourced Services – the benefits as seen by Computer Weekly

24 June 2009

John Redfern, MD of Inovis in UK & EMEA has been quoted in Computer Weekley.com with his position on Outsourcing EDI

Many organisations use the EDI data format to send business-critical documents, such as purchase orders, delivery notes and shipping notes, between suppliers and retailers.

One SME that has benefited from a Saas-based EDI service is drinks maker Innocent.

Innocent said it has relatively limited IT staffing, but needs to communicate with retailers around the clock. It uses a managed EDI service from Inovis, which has helped to remove the complexity of sending documents back and forth.

Managed EDI also has a flat-rate pricing structure, so costs are predictable and low, said the firm.

John Redfern, managing director EMEA at Inovis, said, “Exchanging data with retailers is a complex business. Inovis addresses this by managing the whole process, from hosted software on a user-friendly platform, to translating data into required formats and integration into back-office EDI systems. This leaves the business free to focus on strategic IT activities.”


Eagle-eyed visibility

16 March 2009

At the recent EMEA sales meeting I spoke of in my last blog, we spent a few minutes looking at the fantastic birds of prey and, in particular, a three and a half year old Eagle and thought, “Does an eagle have a supply chain?” Just like us, eagles have to eat and in captivity are fed by their keepers. Now whilst birds of prey will eat many of the animals we find undesirable and if they were found in our houses, we’d flip, it does raise an interesting area around visibility throughout the supplychain.

Birds of prey have some of the best eyesight of any birds on the planet and this level of vision, or visibility, is just what is achieveable using the Inovis Actionable Intelligence solution. Being able to be informed of problems before they happen in the supply chain is just one of the many facilities available. If managers and directors of logistics or  supplychain at suppliers to the big high street supermarkets could be aware of an issue before their, or their 3PLs, lorry even arrived to collect the goods to delivery to the distribution centre which then ends up on the shelves for consumers to buy, what would that be worth? Imagine what would happen if an eagle doesn’t get its dinner in time and could talk. Those talons!

eagle


Onboarding your business community

4 March 2009

Image Source: http://www.thekua.com

Image Source: http://www.thekua.com

Following on from Tracey Robertson’s blog entitled Have you heard of Business Community Management, I’ve just returned from the Inovis EMEA sales meeting where I presented Actionable Intelligence, part of the Inovis Business Community Management (BCM) platform, to the sales team with a focus on onboarding. What is onboarding you may ask? Well, as I come from an EDI/B2B background, onboarding is that part of the implementation where you make contact with the trading partner for the first time, see whether they do EDI/B2B or not, see what standards they use, see what message implementation guidelines they have… and so on. You know the score if you do this as part of your day-to-day job. Onboarding takes this process and maps it to a workflow about managing a trading partner into your business community by taking them through the process but using a friendly web-based solution. Onboarding provides a facility to survey the readiness of the trading partner, provide them the messages implementation guidelines, provides a self-test facility to upload a file which is tested, in real-time, as to whether it complies with the specs provided and, in the case of continuing to fail to pass, we can help them with a remediation program rather than leaving them to get more frustrated and complain about how difficult this EDI thing is!

If you want to know more then please drop me an e-mail and I will be happy to help!


WHY IS INOVIS JOINING IN A SCRUM?

26 February 2009

With the Rugby Six Nations in full swing in Europe, many people may find it unusual that a leading provider of on-demand Business Community Management solutions is joining in on this sport.

Even one of Inovis’ customers is in on the act, with the Irish rugby team drinking innocent smoothies before their games.


Image Source: http://www.thegeofactor.com

Image Source: http://www.thegeofactor.com

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