Following a business acquisition and continued business growth, the UK’s largest toy & game wholesaler, TOMY decided to consolidate their existing EDI platforms into one Outsourced Centralised Solution.
Our goal is simple, yet important. TOMY’s mission is to inspire and fulfil the dreams of children and parents worldwide. They offer a wide range of popular toy brands that children love and parents ask for by name, including: Chuggington™, Lamaze®, John Deere, Ertl®, Winnie the Pooh® Aquadoodle® and Jim Henson’s Dinosaur Train™
TOMY never take for granted the role toys play in the lives of children. Together, TOMY can continue to inspire the dreams of children around the world through great play.
Initially TOMY (formerly of Racing Champions) used a mixture of EDI solutions to fulfil their EDI requirements for exchanging a wide range of structured business documents with their trading partners. However, due to continued growth this soon became increasingly complex and difficult to maintain. An ERP running on an AS/400 required a specific skill set, whilst also having an in house EDI solution again meant staff required a specialised skill set; not to mention hardware and software for disaster recovery and additional skilled staff to cover for absentees from work.
“It was the business aim of TOMY to improve our EDI ability, and strive to have as many customers utilising EDI as possible” explained Stuart Kahn, IT Manager at TOMY.
The Solution: AMOS (Advance Managed Outsourced Solution) offering.
With TOMY’s impending ERP move over to SAP in progress, TOMY took the decision to move over to AdvanceFirst Technologies AMOS (Advance Managed Outsourced Solution) offering, whilst drawing on AdvanceFirst’s highly experienced Managed Service team. By doing so, TOMY were able to initially consolidate both their old legacy EDI solution and their existing in-house solution onto AMOS.
Furthermore, AMOS was then able to seamlessly integrate directly into TOMY’s new SAP ERP without impacting TOMY’s normal day to day business activities. TOMY were now able to respond to increasingly complex EDI mandates imposed on them by their customers in a faster and more effective manner due to AdvanceFirst Managed Service team. As a consequence of this, TOMY now have some 44 trading partners connected via EDI, with 37,896 orders and 20,364 invoices being processed each year through AMOS.
“Implementing AFT’s AMOS was, without doubt, the right way forward for us here at TOMY. I would not hesitate to recommend AFT’s services to all our trading partners”, commented Stuart.
The User Interface to AMOS known as ARC (Archive, Retrieval and Control) is used extensively by TOMY’s customer services team. This allows TOMY to view, in real time, all EDI transactions in and out of AMOS. ARC also provides TOMY with the ability to keep their product data up to date, which for any supplier is of paramount importance. AMOS is also used to process TOMY’s website orders generated by the public, and again, these are seamlessly integrated directly into SAP.
“The power of AMOS provides TOMY with the ability to quickly react to an ever-changing EDI landscape. Whether this is implementing ASN’s across their European Customers, or adhering to Digital Signatures for Spanish customers, AMOS provides TOMY the ability to react quickly and efficiently” commented Paul Leach, EDI Consultant at AdvanceFirst Technologies.
TOMY are a classic example of a major supplier experiencing continuous changes imposed on them by their customers. Whether this is Asda imposing 2048kb Encryption, Morrison’s migration from Tradacoms to EDIFACT, implementing Digital Signatures across Spanish customers, or even Amazon’s change of AS2 setup, AMOS provides TOMY the ability to fulfil all their customers’ requirements. They can now be much more proactive with customers rather than purely reactive, making them much easier for their clients to do business with.
AMOS is being used to integrate directly with TOMY’s European Logistics provider to enabling them to generate ASN’s for their European Customer base. The same technology is now being rolled out to their UK logistics provider, to again, enable TOMY to fulfil all their customers’ requirements.
TOMY are also using AMMX (Advance Managed Messaging Xchange) from AdvanceFirst internally to enable them to securely send and receive data across their internal network and to connect to their instance of AMOS with complete auditability of all the data files exchanged.
More about AMOS
- 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.
