A California based E-Commerce Grocer has successfully implemented Simplain Vendor Portal, to modernize and streamline their Master Data Management processes and improve data accuracy and productivity. The E-Commerce grocer uses the MDM related modules in Simplain Vendor Portal for managing their Vendor, Products, Cost & Retail.
Background
The primary goals of this initiative were:
Improve Master Data Accuracy & improve supply chain efficiencies
Modernize item management process to capture all the attributes correctly and completely to address increasing demands from the online shoppers.
Improve productivity of their, rather lean master data management team to address business events that require Mass Data Updates.
Improved data governance that assigns accountability for various individuals and departments to perform their tasks while providing overall visibility to the relevant master data components
To implement a scalable solution that can accommodate business growth with respect to number of products, warehouses, suppliers, and internal users.
Data Accuracy
As an E-Commerce Innovator, the grocer looks to manage vendors and products accurately. In their core segment, the healthy food arena, accurate product information is critical to consumers. They chose Simplain Vendor Portal to manage this process. The E-Commerce populates its ERP application with data collected and scrubbed in Simplain Vendor Portal using the portal's comprehensive validation rules for its extensive set of standard and user-defined attributes. In this implementation, Simplain Vendor Portal is the one source of truth for its master data. The bi-directional APIs provided by Simplain Vendor Portal allowed it to be in sync with the grocer's back-end ERP system. More importantly, this function will allow vendors and the grocer (as and when they open up the application for its their vendors) to view and act on the same data using the same application.
Modern MDM solution Configured for Grocery Retail
Simplain vendor portal is a work-flow driven application allowing various departments within the organization to perform their role effectively without being a bottleneck to the overall process. The product data model in the solution is compliant with the GDSN standard allowing the e-commerce grocer to manage rich dataset for the products they sell. In addition to managing the minimum information required for purchasing and selling the products, the grocer’s users can manage nutritional information, allergens, certifications, product images and detailed consumer facing descriptions etc.
Productivity
Often lost in the procurement process is the immense amount of effort required to effectively manage vendors, items, discounts and allowances, rebates, and more. The E-Commerce Grocer availed the user-defined Mass Upload templates and APIs to handle the large amount of master data changes. The Mass upload templates and APIs have the same amount of data validation as the screens ensuring that data integrity is not compromised even during mass data management operations.
Data Governance
The E-Commerce Grocer uses Simplain’s approval workflow to segregate responsibilities and approval processes to implement segregation of duties and accountability. The audit-log functions help data stewards to keeps track of "who changed what and when" even as the master data is exchanged between vendor and various internal departments. Armed with well-defined work-flows and traceability provided by the audit-log, the data governance teams can be sure all parties are consistently following the best practices.
Scalability
The E-Commerce Grocer recognized the streamlined and comprehensive nature of the Simplain Vendor Portal Suite and the ability to add additional modules from Simplain Vendor Portal as needed. Simplain Vendor Portal is designed for retailers and wholesalers. The E-Commerce Grocer chose Simplain Vendor Portal primarily to have a solid foundation on which it can scale and be agile as it continues to innovate.
Technology and Integration
Simplain Vendor Portal is delivered as a SaaS solution to the e-commerce grocer. Simplain provides REST APIs for inbound and outbound data integration between the Vendor Portal and on-premise/other cloud environments. In addition, Simplain and The E-Commerce Grocer teams worked together to build data consistency checks between the grocer’s in-house systems and Simplain Vendor Portal.
Next Steps
As a leader in the online grocery space, the e-commerce grocer continues to innovate and scale. The E-Commerce Grocer plans to build on the foundational platform they built using Simplain Vendor Portal and potentially leverage other features.
Simplain Vendor Portal is a leading supplier collaboration software for grocery retailers and wholesalers.
As a SaaS solution, Simplain Vendor Portal is continuously improving based on implementations such as this and customer feedback. In addition, Simplain is actively working on some generative AI features and user experience related enhancements that should help its community as a whole.Please visit our product page for more information about the modules and features.