Dot Foods, the nation's largest food redistributor, has selected EXTOL as a key part of its strategy to eliminate custom-coded interfaces and manual processes from the company's supply chain systems. EXTOL is a leading provider of business-to-business and application-to-application integration software.
Dot Foods has deployed the EXTOL Business Integrator (EBI) to automate the processing and integration of data from its customers who wish to exchange transactions via spreadsheets, flat files, and XML into its established processes for EDI transactions. This automation eliminates the need for "swivel-chair integration"--the prevalent, but costly and inefficient, practice of manually re-keying data from one system or application into another.
"Without this automation, we would have to hire more clerks dedicated to data entry," said Sean Ketcham, Dot's electronic commerce coordinator. "The average order entry clerk enters 30,000 line items per month. In 2007, we received 3,786,352 line items through EDI and EXTOL, an average of 291,258 per month," said Ketcham. "That's the same workload as 9.7 data entry clerks. The additional staffing would detract from our goal of controlling headcount growth. Keeping track of these metrics gives us a compelling argument to automate even before taking into account the accuracy aspect of automation."
IT team members at Dot Foods were able to quickly adopt EXTOL Business Integrator and eliminate the need to write custom interfaces to move data between applications, processes, and platforms. "It's easy to use, and offers the any-to-any mapping we were looking for contributing to an efficient deployment and ongoing productivity improvements," said Ketcham.
EXTOL Business Integrator's functionality has enabled Dot Foods to meet a corporate mandate to automate 80 percent of its purchase orders. IT went from receiving more than 20,000 automated EDI purchase orders per month in 2006 to an average of 24,000 per month in 2007, a jump of 20 percent. In addition, the company already is receiving more than 1,700 automated, non-EDI-based purchase orders each month.
Many food-industry companies rely on EXTOL to help keep their goods moving and their headcounts stable. These firms include: Burris Logistics, an east-coast food distributor; CR England, a nationwide refrigerated transport and logistics company; Bozzuto's, a northeast food distributor to supermarkets; Bob Evans Foods, a restaurant chain and food distributor; as well as Krispy Crème, Carvel, and Mrs. T's Pierogies.
Dot Foods plays a complex role in the supply chains of its vendors and customers, acting as buyer, seller, warehouse, redistributor, and shipper. Each of these services requires multiple touches across multiple business processes and multiple enterprises. Dot has 3,500 customers ordering 70,000 different products from 700 suppliers.
"EXTOL gives Dot Foods the agility they need to rapidly respond to the requirements of thousands of trading partners-no matter what role in the supply chain they are filling-and deliver accurate and timely information and products," says Steve Rosen, EXTOL vice president of Marketing. "As a result, they are easy to do business with and offer superior supply chain performance as a core competency."
About EXTOL International, Inc.
EXTOL International, Inc. is a leading provider of B2B integration application software for resource-constrained companies who want to integrate demand driven supply chains. EXTOL solutions are ready-to-use applications that target multiple B2B and internal challenges with a common integration platform that empowers existing IT teams to respond rapidly to new business opportunities and demands. EXTOL solutions are also available preconfigured to address specific electronic commerce applications including EDI, AS2, XML, data synchronization (1SYNC) and the integration and management capabilities required to take full advantage of supply chain functionality. For more information, visit http://www.extol.com/.
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