Having the right software partner is vital for any fabricator, especially when it comes to growing product lines and order quantities to meet the needs of larger contracts. But as you’ll find in this article, the right partner should be able to do more than help you increase and streamline production. Integrating with the sellers’ systems (EDI or others) can make a huge difference in your efficiency and profitability.
Consider this Fabricator for example…
A fabrication client located outside of the U.S. came to Solatech having just signed on with SelectBlinds.com, one of the largest dot com sellers in the window fashion industry. The contract represented an exponential increase in production for the fabricator, creating significant challenges for them on two fronts: ramping up and streamlining the manufacturing process, and integration with the seller’s EDI (Electronic Data Integration) system.
The proven capability of our fabrication software led the client to call us to help scale up and optimize their manufacturing process, which we did and have done for fabricators for decades. However, the benefit that the client didn’t necessarily expect was Solatech’s ability to handle the integration with SelectBlinds.com’s EDI requirements.
If you’ve worked with any big retailer, you already know that almost all will demand that their suppliers integrate their existing production processes. In many cases, that would require a two way EDI integration in order to make ordering and fulfilling as efficient as possible. For our client, the choice was to figure out how to make their manufacturing software communicate with the seller’s EDI, or manually enter product and ordering data from one system into the other.
The latter would have been a nightmare. Handling the data manually would have been labor-intensive, prone to mistakes and, as a result, very costly. Integration was a must!
SPS Commerce happened to be the EDI provider of choice, which meant our fabricator had to figure out a way to make their production system integrate with SPS’s system. Fortunately, Solatech’s fabrication software and development team are all too familiar with these challenges. We were able to partner with the fabricator, the seller and SPS to ensure complete integration.
Our software now provides that seamless connection, receiving and processing EDI orders for the seller and our fabrication client. Working with one of the largest online sellers in our industry, a major, publicly trade EDI supply chain management company, and an international fabricator, we make the relationship work.
If it sounds like a complex undertaking, you’re right. It was. In reality, it took a high degree of expertise and collaboration to make it happen. However, this is where having the right partner made such a big difference for our fabricator client. Our software is designed for this type of integration. And we have the experience of working with major retail and EDI players. In the end, we were able to save our fabricator client countless hours and costly errors.
Want to learn more?
You are welcome to read about our comprehensive fabrication software. But for a deeper dive into how our we could help you integrate EDI and connect the dots for smooth, efficient, profitable retailer relationships, talk with us or request a demo.