Quick results
Pervasive Data Integrator allowed Art Line to achieve full EDI production in less than two weeks.
Cost savings
Using Pervasive, Art Line was able to shed costs throughout the company through automation.
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Art Line meets UCCnet standards quickly, effectively with Pervasive
News was received from the biggest retailers of hardlines goods: Suppliers must comply with the new UCCnet standards in order to sell and ship to stores such as Lowe’s, Home Depot and Wal-Mart. Art Line Inc., one of the leading makers of outdoor decor, needed to merge data from many sources to meet retailers’ UCCnet requirements. Russell R. Snella, IT director for Art Line, started a search for a way to meet EDI and UCCnet requirements. He needed a solution that would fit a modest-sized IT department, one that serves a merchandise maker for a worldwide retail market. Less than two weeks after the company downloaded its free Pervasive trial, Art Line went into full EDI production with Pervasive Data Integrator.
EDI data synchronization, compliance with UCCnet required
UCCnet is becoming the only acceptable way to communicate sales and order data to top retail corporations. Leading retailers such as Lowe’s Home Improvement, Ace Hardware, Wal-Mart, Wegmans and the Home Depot are strongly urging their suppliers to subscribe immediately to the registration and synchronization services of UCCnet and implement these services on a timely basis.
According to IT Director Snella, the hardlines industry is jumping on UCCnet very quickly, so Art Line had to establish UCCnet compliance immediately in order to remain competitive in the marketplace. UCCnet relies on external EDI data synchronization. While hardlines suppliers with large ERP systems were meeting the EDI challenge, the mid-market retailers did not have the resources or the ability to figure out how to get the data.
“The biggest challenge was figuring out how to do an internal synchronization, to get all the data from all the different sources in a company, then import into Art Line’s source of record to send to UCCnet,” added Snella. Snella searched for a way to manage the data from a wide array of sources: Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, as well as data from a COBOL system attached to SQL databases. All had to contribute to EDI and UCCnet compliance. However most of the integration products he evaluated failed the challenge.
“I spent three weeks and I couldn’t get a document out of the EDI mapping translator software,” Snella said. “I tried to use the SQL Server parser, and that wouldn’t work with the EDI documents, because of all the changes.” Still, Art Line was challenged to meet the requirements of all the major retailers including POs, shipping, Advance Ship Notices, invoicing and point of sales data.
Art Line is in full EDI production in less than two weeks using Pervasive
Art Line IT Director Russell R. Snella found “there was only one product we found that could touch source documents from disparate systems – from Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, or over in a COBOL system attached to SQL Server. That’s why we’re using Pervasive Data Integrator so extensively. It was definitely the solution I needed and still depend on every day.”
Less than two weeks after the company downloaded its free Pervasive trial, Art Line went into full EDI production with Pervasive Data Integrator. “That’s an amazing feat for any company,” Snella said. “We process a tremendous volume of documents every day. We’ve taken a lot of processes out of our ERP system so we don’t do customer entry in our ERP system anymore. We rely on Pervasive to feed the data through their power transformation engine, to make sure that it’s clean and it meets our criteria before we update our ERP system.”
Pervasive Data Integrator moved Art Line to an automated approach to invoicing EDI customers
Before integration with Pervasive, Art Line was hand-typing invoices into an EDI screen. Art Line’s shipping system once ran in batch mode, which meant the entire shipping department had to shut down an hour a day to run updates. Pervasive replaced it with updates every two minutes so business processes are not interrupted and no one has to go offline. Art Line now runs invoicing for all of its EDI customers in less than seven minutes only one day a week. “Our payout was two months, tops,” Snella said. “We’ve gained man-days because of that. That’s why the Pervasive product works so beautifully for retailers facing UCCnet compliance standards.”
Pervasive helps Art Line cut costs
Pervasive Data Integrator has been deployed throughout Art Line’s manufacturing operation, and Snella said its cut costs for the company in several areas. Batch operations have been eliminated to provide constant uptime, and invoices are executed in minutes. Snella said the Pervasive process designer made integration a snap. “The integration was so quick that it did what I wanted, right away. Now I use the process designer, and we run our processes all the time. We have scheduled processes at 9, 2 and 4 o’clock,” said Snella. "Pervasive has since reduced two Full Time Equivalencies and reduced our labor costs." Art Line sends between 150 to 200 invoices a week to its largest customers, some of the world’s leading retailers. Pervasive helps Art Line automate this process, establishing business rules in the processes that help gather the data more quickly and reliably.
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