Brau Union Österreich has a total of approximately 49,000 clients in retail locations and F&B and ultimately serves millions of beer enthusiasts around the country. However, Brau Union Österreich needs help in the logistics department to ensure deliveries to all its clients from its 32 locations. This is where dozens of external sales partners come in, who make deliveries on behalf of Brau Union Österreich. This is undoubtedly a significant challenge for information logistics.
For each of the 200,000 annual deliveries, different sales partners have to send order-specific delivery notes to beverage retailers in order to start the in-house invoicing process. Brau Union Österreich has been in business for a long time and has previously tried a variety of approaches for managing its sales partners. ”It was a system that had grown organically and had different communication channels, which was a result of our heterogeneous sales partner structure,“ said Sophia Lang, IT Functional Consultant at Brau Union Österreich. ”Occasionally, we would have to resort to ‘manual‘ action or look for specific data sets.“
Sales partners get "ready to use EDI"
This prompted the company to ask its long-time EDI service provider EDITEL to find a solution to this issue. EDITEL‘s centralized data hub eXite® was the obvious technical solution. Going forward, Brau Union Österreich plans to get all its sales partners ”ready to use EDI.“ Given the differences among participating partners, the biggest challenge was ”to find a common denominator for all of them,“ said Ms. Lang.
Despatch advices for a total of 60 Brau Union Österreich sales partners are now sent via EDITEL in a secure and traceable process. We make things especially convenient for our clients: as soon as data is received, EDITEL performs a validation service for all despatch advices. As a result, only correct data are forwarded to Brau Union Österreich. If any inconsistencies are detected, e-mail notifications are sent out so that clients will know immediately what the problem is. When it comes to the implementation of the project, Sophia Lang said it was ”very effortless“ and found it ”extremely helpful that EDITEL oversaw all processes with our individual retail partners.“