Fulfilling Impossible Demands

Just some weeks back, Edward Keller Ltd, a trading powerhouse in HongKong, was called into a "town hall" meeting by its major customer,Hong Kong's biggest supermarket, Park 'N Shop, as were 500 of thesupermarket's other suppliers. There, a bombshell was dropped on them:the supermarket wanted them onboard its next phase of supply chainenhancement. All suppliers had to send their invoices to Park 'N Shopvia EDI instead of hardcopy, to allow it to reduce manual work inreconciling invoices against the thousands of POs it receives dailyvia EDI. And suppliers had to be ready in three months or lose itspatronage.

While some suppliers scrambled to figure out how to fulfil theircustomer's latest mandate, for Edward Keller, it was just another dayin its business life. Being squeezed in the middle of a supply chainresided by customers at both ends, it has to be ready for any supplychain tweaks and yanks at their whim. The distributor serves, on oneend of its supply chain, big supermarkets such as Park 'N Shop andhospitals managed by the Hong Kong Hospital Authority; and on theother, Fortune 1000 principals such as PepsiCo and Merck.

Out-of-the-way customer requests are no problem for Edward Keller,thanks to its early deployment of integrated supply chain software.Edward Keller uses JD Edwards' ERP and SCM software running theOneWorld release, which was implemented in 2000 in replacement of anAS400 mainframe system. It also maintains an open infrastructurestandardised on MicrosoftMicrosoft's technology. It has a reporting system thatsends sales inventory and procurement data daily to 25 principals viae-mail or programs written in-house. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

Zoltan Peter Szabo, CIO forGreater China at Edward Keller, says early investment in SCM isproving to be worth its while. "The majority of our IT investments inthe past three years almost exclusively revolved around supply chaintechnology such as EDI and reporting infrastructure. Our customers arenot shopping for a set of wheels and four walls to store theirproducts. We play a proactive role in enabling their products to flowdownstream in the supply chain and enable the information to flowupstream. Our systems not only have to transact with customers andsuppliers but channel information," he adds.