Fast track retail small-supplier onboarding, supplier enablement, and data exchange while reducing time to value and cost.

To maintain control of their supply chains, retailers must easily connect and collaborate with all of their suppliers. However, many are spending too much time and money manually processing data from their smaller suppliers to support supplier enablement. The problem? Up to 80 percent of small suppliers aren’t able to support traditional B2B formats for supplier data exchange.

As a result, many retailers invest in manual workarounds to integrate and exchange data with their small suppliers. Not only are these workarounds costly and time-consuming, they often result in information delays and incomplete, error-filled information that must be validated and corrected before retailers can make important decisions.

Retailers need a way to easily connect and improve collaboration to support small-supplier onboarding and data exchange.

The Informatica Solution for Retail Small Supplier Enablement

Our solution helps you reduce the time and cost of manually processing data from small suppliers. It allows you to connect to and collaborate with the 80 percent of small suppliers that are unable to support traditional B2B formats, while shortening integration time and reducing costs. With the Informatica solution for retail small-supplier enablement, you can:

• Eliminate manual data processing for supplier enablement
• Speed supplier onboarding and automate data exchange
• Ensure quality data exchange with automated data validation and error reporting
• Improve collaboration with small suppliers
• Mitigate risks for supplier disruptions and hidden costs to shelf
• Speed time to market with quick onboarding and updates of supplier or vendor product catalogs

Retail Small Supplier Enablement Capabilities

The Informatica solution for retail small-supplier enablement is different from other solutions because it allows retailers to onboard small suppliers while automating all types of data exchange.

Capabilities include:

• Support for parsing unstructured data, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, allowing small suppliers to integrate files without changing them
• Prebuilt EDI libraries for retail, including VICS, UCS, and X12 to accelerate new projects and support supplier enablement
• Local operator-specific parameters to direct Informatica PowerCenter workflows and maximize reuse
• Single mapping to build canonical-based Excel templates and standardize data exchanges with smaller suppliers
• Schema validation to flag errors before low-quality data is moved into billing systems
• End-to-end activity monitoring of all exchanges to identify and resolve data errors
• Audit trails and partner dashboards to empower the business with effective performance monitoring