ERP and EDI
ERP and EDI for wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers and the retailers they supply
Your retailer's EDI documents accepted. Your product and price data right. The interfaces between them agreeing with each other.
Twenty minutes, bring one problem. Onsite across Melbourne, remote for the rest.
Call me when…
- A retailer has sent a non-compliance notice and the chargebacks are eating your margin.
- A new retailer wants purchase orders, ASNs and invoices by EDI by a date you cannot miss.
- The one person who understood your ERP data or your EDI mapping is leaving, or has left.
- Your ERP vendor wants you to upgrade and your product master and price file are a mess.
- The retailer bounced Friday's invoices and nobody can say why, and month-end cost updates take three days of spreadsheets.
- Your ERP, your web store and your 3PL disagree about stock, price or orders, and someone reconciles them by hand every week.
- You are mid-implementation or mid-upgrade and nobody owns the data migration, the test scripts and the cutover.
What I do
Inside the ERP
Product and price data that is right
The master data every document and every price depends on.
- Product and supplier master data: items, GTINs at every pack level, hierarchies, ranging and grading.
- Pricing and costing: RRP, future-dated and clearance pricing, promotions and deals, supplier cost updates, bulk loads, month-end cost updates.
- Validation and load tooling so the data goes in right once, and the exception report that says what did not.
- Data readiness, test scripts, UAT and cutover for an upgrade, a migration or a new module.
- The written change note and your sign-off before anything reaches the live system, with a rollback step.
Across the EDI network
Documents your trading partners accept
Both chairs: the network that certifies, and the retailer that rejects.
- Trading-partner onboarding and certification against the retailer's specification, with real orders in the test run.
- The retailer's compliance guide read against your last 90 days of rejections, chargebacks and non-compliance notices.
- Mapping specifications for purchase orders, order responses, ASNs and invoices; partner, location and GLN set-up.
- Rejections traced to the document, the field and the rule, fixed once at the cause, re-sent inside the chargeback window.
- Network, VAN and retailer liaison in your name; the accounts stay yours.
At the joins
Interfaces that agree with each other
Where orders, stock and prices cross a system boundary.
- Interface specifications and data-flow documentation between ERP, EDI, web store, 3PL or WMS and store systems.
- Exception handling: what happens to an order, a price or a stock figure that one side rejects.
- The reporting that shows whether it is working: SQL against the ERP, Power BI on top.
- When it is bigger than one person, the scope, the test and the change run with your ERP's own partner.
Which order model do you run?
Most businesses run two or three of these at once, one per major customer. Each changes the document set, the structure of the ASN, which GLNs must exist and how the ERP has to be configured. The first ten minutes of the call establish which you run and where it breaks.
| Model | How orders arrive and ship | Documents in play | What must be right in the ERP |
|---|---|---|---|
| DC replenishment | The retailer's distribution centre orders in bulk; you ship pallets and cartons to the DC. | Purchase order, order response, ASN with pallet, carton and item levels and SSCCs, invoice per shipment. | Pack configurations and inner and outer GTINs, DC GLNs, lead times, carton labels produced from the ERP or WMS. |
| Direct to store | Each store, or head office on its behalf, orders; you deliver to the store. | Purchase order per store, ASN per delivery, invoice per store or consolidated to a statement. | A ship-to GLN and customer record per store, store-level pricing and promotions, delivery runs and proof of delivery. |
| Cross-dock, packed by store | One order to the DC with store allocations; you pack by store and the DC sorts without opening cartons. | Purchase order with store-level allocation, ASN with store-level cartons and labels, consolidated invoice. | Allocation held at line and store level, carton labelling to the retailer's specification, picking by store in the warehouse. |
| Drop ship | The retailer's web store takes the consumer order; you ship each parcel direct. | Purchase order per consumer order, stock availability feed, ASN per parcel with carrier tracking, invoice per order, returns advice. | Near-real-time stock availability, dispatch service levels, carrier integration, returns handling, consumer address and privacy handling. |
| Consignment and scan-based trading | Stock sits in the retailer's store or DC and stays yours until it is sold. | Sales and stock reports from the retailer, invoice raised on reported sales, stock adjustments. | Consignment stock locations, invoice-on-sale logic, reconciliation of reported sales against stock on hand. |
| Vendor-managed inventory | You decide replenishment from the retailer's sales and stock data. | Sales and inventory reports in, proposed or self-raised orders out, then ASN and invoice as usual. | Forecasting and minimum and maximum logic, order generation, the retailer's acceptance loop. |
| 3PL-fulfilled | Your ERP holds the order; a third-party warehouse picks, packs and ships. | Warehouse shipping order and receipt advice between ERP and 3PL, shipment confirmation back, the retailer's ASN built from it. | Stock reconciled across ERP and 3PL, the 3PL's container labels and SSCCs, timing so the ASN leaves before the truck does. |
| Group, franchise and multi-distributor | A head office orders for member stores, or your distributors fulfil orders placed centrally. | Group purchase order split by ship-to, order responses per leg, invoices to the right bill-to. | Bill-to and ship-to separated and mapped, distributor-specific pricing, visibility of who shipped what to whom. |
| Web, marketplace and emailed orders | Orders arrive outside EDI: a web store, a marketplace, a PDF or a spreadsheet. | API or file feeds, or capture into the ERP, then the same acknowledgement, dispatch and invoice discipline. | One order pipeline with no rekeying; back-order and partial-shipment rules applied the same way as for EDI orders. |
Whatever the model, the back-order and partial-shipment policy is agreed with the retailer and configured once: what the order response says about accepted, changed and rejected lines, what ships, and when the invoice is raised. The document names above map to X12 850, 855, 856, 810, 846 and 852 and to EDIFACT ORDERS, ORDRSP, DESADV, INVOIC, INVRPT and SLSRPT; the retailer's guide decides which.
Four ways to start
ERP and EDI health check · three days
- Days one and two
- With you: I read your retailers' vendor-compliance guides and EDI specifications, your last 90 days of rejections, chargebacks and non-compliance notices, and your product master, GLNs and price file, and spend an hour with whoever does it today.
- Day three
- A written findings list: what is failing and why, what it is costing you in chargebacks and rework, the three fixes you can make this month, and a costed fix plan that is also the quote for whatever comes next.
- How you check it
- Every finding cites the document, the field and the retailer rule it broke.
Retailer EDI onboarding sprint · per trading partner
- What you get
- Purchase order, order response, ASN and invoice mapped to the retailer's specification, a test run of real orders with you watching, certification passed, first production documents accepted, a one-page runbook. Three to five working days over the retailer's certification cycle.
- How you check it
- The retailer's test and production acceptances in your own network account.
Product and price data clean-up · before an upgrade, migration or new channel
- What you get
- Items, hierarchy, GTINs, GLNs, costs, RRP and promotional pricing validated, an exception list with owners, a cleaned file loaded to your test system and signed off, a validation template you keep. About five days.
- How you check it
- The exception count before and after, in your own test load.
Implementation, upgrade and incident support · by the day
- What you get
- A senior pair of hands for the data, the test scripts and the cutover of an ERP implementation or upgrade. Fix-and-resend when a retailer rejects a day's documents or a price load goes wrong in every store, with a one-page incident write-up. Cover at your desk when your ERP or EDI person is on leave.
- How you check it
- The written cap and the weekly note.
Scoped work is a fixed quote. Urgent or ongoing work is by the day with a cap. A retailer has given you a date? Skip the health check: the onboarding sprint is quoted directly. No price is printed here. The shape and the rate are said on the first call and written down before any work starts.
What you give me
- Your retailers' vendor-compliance guides and EDI specifications.
- A network login created in your name for me.
- Read access to your ERP test system.
- One hour with whoever does it today.
Worth knowing
- I do not configure or develop inside an ERP I have not worked in. One mid-market ERP's product and price engine I have run for years; on any other ERP I specify, map, test and run the change through your ERP's own partner or administrator.
- Business hours Melbourne time, next-business-day response. Incident recovery is day-rate work when it breaks, not a service level.
- Network, VAN and ERP-vendor fees are yours, paid direct. I sell no software and take no margin on it.
Contact
Amit BhardwajFounder and Principal Consultant
Seabrook, Melbourne
Seabrook, Melbourne
Quantonic Legacy Innovations Pty LtdABN 79 692 155 230 · ACN 692 155 230