Collaborative Trading Partner - December 2005

For the Demand Driven Supply Network (DDSN) to truly make in-roads, collaboration must become a common practice within the consumer goods industry. Beyond question, some great examples of collaboration between manufacturers and retailers exist today but they are few and far between. That's one of the reasons why CGT recognized Associated Wholesale Grocers and General Mills as this year's front-runners of the Collaborative Trading Partner award.
With projected sales of $5.1 billion for 2004, AWG is the nation's second largest retailer-owned grocery wholesaler in the United States. The company contracted with AquiTec Inc., to implement an advanced Collaborative Data Synchronization solution. AWG will utilize GS1 US as its data pool for data synchronization and the technology will be integrated with AquiTec's operational and collaborative Supply Chain Management (SCM) software currently in place at AWG. The data sync solution includes a collaborative price and promotion portal called Pavilion, allowing data synchronization of new item/price information that has been accepted by the category managers of the merchandising area to be automatically synchronized with the item information from the Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN), and automatically and electronically input into AWG's Procurement/Billing System.

Hard Dollar ROI
AWG's Chief Information Officer Keith Martin is a passionate proponent of his company's collaboration strategy, which he claims could not have been crafted without a little help from his manufacturing partners. According to Martin, the success of a collaborative effort is not only judged by the benefits attained, but also from the intangible of individual goals and objectives merging into a common vision. "I challenged my entire team to show me the hard dollar ROI that we would generate with this solution, and we even hosted sessions with key suppliers for their view on the solution. The results of implementing item data synchronization alone are large, but when you combine them with all the efficiencies of collaborative trade promotion management the ROI potential is huge," says Martin.

The AquiTec data sync solution includes sophisticated workflow engine from LANSA, which has the capability of recognizing the item attributes coming
from AquiTec's category manager portal, and insuring that AWG's required data attributes are accurate before electronically passing these into AWG's procurement/billing systems.

This eliminates many personnel from manual input of data, and provides an immediate reduction in invoice deductions due to input of erroneous data from the manufacturers as well as internal staff of the retailer.