Nisa-Today's, the UK's largest retail and wholesale buying group, is using new business-to-business (B2B) electronic trading software to standardise key supply chain communications with its smaller, local suppliers.
The member-owned organisation of over 5,000 UK independent retailers and wholesalers of food, drink and household provisions turns over a 1.075 billion annually and needed to improve its largely manual, time-consuming and error-prone B2B communications with smaller suppliers.
David Morris, Nisa-Today's head of IT said the company had selected supply chain specialist, Kewill Systems to provide an online application to enable it to interact with more of its smaller suppliers using a standard interface.
Morris said: "The development will allow Nisa-Today's to trade with smaller suppliers, many of which are local, via an interface that will not require any manual intervention. This will increase our ability to bring on new suppliers quickly and support them, while ensuring a streamlined flow of consistent information throughout our host systems."
The system will also help the company meet its member requirements to supplement centrally-managed mainstream branded and own-brand products with locally produced goods.
Morris added that the project will be cost-effective in the long-term. "The consistent flow of orders and invoice data into our organisation will mean Nisa-Today's will not need to invest in additional resources to manage the project," he said.
"The simplicity of the system will enable other suppliers to join in and the rapid deployment will ensure that Nisa-Today's effectively meets its target for deliveries," Morris added.
The implementation extends the grocery buyer long-term relationship with Kewill and is expected to go live later this summer.
It also supplements work to update Nisa-Today's legacy IBM Power4-based UNIX and Oracle 9i IT infrastructure to speed order processing times and reduce the risk of downtime, as reported by IT PRO late last year.
