In 2013, following a decision to break away from their parent company, Vegetarian Food Supplier Great Food had a need to fulfil their EDI mandates with their customers, whilst also integrating directly into their Sage Line 50 ERP.
At the start of his gourmet career training at Marks & Spencer’s, Richard was lucky enough to work with top chefs like Albert Roux. It was Roux who took Richard to the finest restaurants and manufacturers of gourmet food across the Continent. Richard understands the importance of sourcing the finest ingredients – to him, taste is paramount. In 1996, a brush with a serious illness put him out of action for 18 months and Richard realised then the importance of taking care of our bodies. From then on healthy eating was the only way forward. He decided to produce fresh, balanced food stuffed full of vegetables, herbs and spices. From vegetarian, kosher and halal, gluten, nuts and dairy free, to vegans; he has sought to provide across the spectrum. And he wasn’t about to soak those high quality ingredients in oil. Richard’s vision was a ‘clean eat’, so he scoured the world for an alternative cooking method, and commissioned special ovens which steam-bake.
Prior to 2013, Great Food used EDI, albeit through a shared EDI solution, that was hosted by Great Food’s 3rd Party logistics provider. Whilst this fulfilled the Great Food EDI mandate with their customers, it did not provide Great Food directly with any EDI functionality. Orders needed to be processed and keyed in manually, whilst invoices were duplicated from their Sage ERP and again manually entered via their 3rd Party Logistics EDI Software.
“Our existing solution lacked the flexibility required to meet our changing business needs, and neither did it provide the EDI benefits we knew existed” explained Tracey Buckingham, Financial Controller at Great Food.
Great Food decided to implement AdvanceFirst Technologies AMOS (Advance Managed Outsourced Solution) offering. This enabled Great Food to respond quickly, and efficiently, to fulfil their urgent EDI requirements due to their pending company break away. By implementing AMOS, Great Food was not only able to fulfil their immediate EDI requirements, they were also able to integrate orders and generate EDI invoices directly out of their Sage Line 50 ERP. This seamless EDI integration into the Great Food ERP helped improve accuracy whilst, more importantly, freeing up valuable internal resource.
With Great Food using AdvanceFirst Technologies Outsourced EDI software, AMOS, all the day to day activities are taken care of by AdvanceFirst Technologies highly experience Managed Service Team. This means that Great Food can do what they do best, knowing that all EDI matters are being monitored and actioned in real time. This service extends to the Onboarding on any new trading partners, or ensuring that product and location data is kept fully up to date to allow for seamless integration.
“AMOS has enabled us to react quickly and efficiently to our customers’ requirements, without tying up valuable internal resource. Furthermore, the seamless integration of documents in and out of our ERP, Sage Line 50, has further enhanced our own internal service levels”, commented Tracey.
AMOS is now being used to exchange EDI data with 9 EDI customers, all of which are using differing formats and differing transfer Protocols. AMOS allows Great Food to ensure that, regardless of the customers preferred format or protocol, they can process ALL documents in the same way through their ERP.
“AdvanceFirst Technologies AMOS Solution has removed all the complexities and day to day concerns of electronic trading from Great Food, thus, enabling them to focus on their own core business objectives” commented Paul Leach, Pre Sales Consultant at AdvanceFirst Technologies.
- AMOS Solution removes all the complexities and day to day concerns of electronic trading
- No VAN costs to you or your trading partners. Your trading partner is provided with Ultra-Secure communications software installed in minutes via a simple download.
- By using AMOS, should you wish to take the operation in-house, we will work with your company to migrate, manage and implement this change.
- Experience with our users shows that the demands of customers are becoming more varied and diverse and vary across a wide variety of messages types and communication methods. With AMOS, all you need to do is to send your standard documents to AMOS and we’ll do the rest, leaving you to deploy your IT resources on mission critical applications and the core business.
Call 01932 230 024 to find out how much we can save you in time and cost by using AMOS our EDI Outsourcing Solution.
