Retail EDI

In this challenging climate, hundreds of retailers are seeing the merits of providing more and more Point-of-Sale (POS) information to their vendor community in an effort to help better manage proper inventory levels and collaborate with their various trading partners. At the same time, retailers are expecting more from their vendors, focusing more on accountability and vendor scorecarding to increase key performance indicators, such as fill rates and on-time deliveries, than ever before. 

The retailer practice of providing POS data to their vendors has been in existence for some time. It got its start early in vendor managed inventory (VMI) models. The difference is the eagerness of the vendor community to better collaborate with the retailer’s buyers and have improved visibility into the actual sales of their items after leaving their distribution center. Vendors are investing in technologies to give them this insight, and are frankly very keen to receive POS information to help them manage their business relationships, be prepared to ship their items when a retailer send their next order, and perform better in vendor scorecarding models. While retailers have traditionally sent out POS information in the form of EDI 852 data files, otherwise known as “product activity data,” they’re trying to determine how to get this kind of information out to more and more of their vendors, and used by them. As such, they’re experimenting with a variety of new technological ways to efficiently distribute this data.

We are 23 days or so into the Holiday season.  Do you know where your sales are?  Do you know them by item, category or client?  This isn’t one of those papers on this year’s sales compared or ’08 or ’07.  I want to go over some data points you or your boss may be a little concerned with.  How to get the data, extract information from it and make the data useful to your efforts.  Why this topic?  One of my favorite blogs raised the question: "What is your business predicting for the 2009 holiday season? Do you expect things to be up or down from last year?"  Someone answered: "I have all the confidence in the world that it will be better. It better be."  It left me thinking - why don't you know? 

I am going to talk about building or using a Sell Through report we can create using an 852 (EDI 852 Activity Report).  As we go on, we will look at which retailers offer it – some require you to receive it, what data is included and what data points inside the 852 are necessary for each of the retail formulas we will cover (Primarily sell thru).