Home : Networking : News

Bernard Matthews deploys 'bootiful' data comms

The turkey farmer brand has cuts data processing costs by up to 25 per cent with a unified electronic trading platform.

By Miya Knights, 10 Mar 2008 at 14:13

Bernard Matthews, the largest farmer of turkeys in the UK, has implemented a new unified electronic trading platform to cut the costs of processing key order information from suppliers by up to 25 per cent.

The company had previously maintained two industry standard, separate electronic data interchange (EDI) systems for managing accounts with its biggest supermarket customers, including orders, delivery note processing and invoice matching.

Edwin Pearson, Bernard Matthews information systems manager told IT PRO that the company operated GSX and AS2 standard EDI systems until last November, when it went live with the new, single management system from provider Inovis to simplify the management of data and reduce the processing time per transaction.

"We had two completely separate processes for managing orders in two discrete systems," he said. "We became aware of Inovis in June of last year and saw its adoption as a straightforward payback in terms of simplification, by drawing the two lots of data into one new system."

Bernard Matthews has implemented Inovisworks, a hosted value-added network (VAN) service that allows it to exchange documents between its key trading partners securely via a portal. And 90 per cent of 1,500-plus orders received each week are shipped on the same day of receipt, while 80 per cent of orders account for 90-95 per cent of the company's business.

"We also get more real-time visibility into what's happening with the system, where previously we would have had to call a helpdesk to resolve any issues," he added. "As such these systems are pretty robust, but if ever there's a problem, the web-based portal means we can do the preliminary investigations ourselves."

Pearson also said the vendor's pricing structure was attractive: "It was very easy to justify switching, as Inovis' pricing structure is based on flat-rate subscription rather than volume of traffic. Therefore, we can guarantee return on investment within six to nine months, with minimal disruption required in the migration process from our old EDI system," he added.