Managed service provision offers the potential for seamless integration

Managed service provision offers the potential for seamless integration

Kerry Foods, part of the Kerry Group, has announced it has selected GXS Managed Services to simplify, manage and run a complex business-to-business (B2B) supply chain.

The company said that the outsourcing deal will improve support as customers diversify in terms of technology and standards, encourage ease-of-adoption among Kerry’s supplier base, and improve the trading network’s security and disaster recovery.

Managing complex supply chain

Kerry Foods is a category leader in chilled foods, including added-value dairy, meat and savoury products, supplying all major supermarket groups, convenience stores and independent retailers in the UK and Ireland with leading brands, including Cheestrings, Richmond and Wall’s sausages. The company is the number one UK frozen ready meals supplier and the number two UK chilled ready meals supplier. As such, speed of order turnaround is critical to their success, with customers typically sending final electronic order confirmations just a few hours before products are loaded onto trailers.

Use of third-party logistics suppliers adds to the complexity of a B2B trading platform that processes an average of 30,000 orders and 150,000 invoices each month with 200 customers. Kerry Foods’ customers include major multiples such as Tesco, Asda, J.Sainsbury, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer. As a long-standing customer of GXS, the provider’s B2B trading network enables Kerry Foods to react to ongoing customer requirements for increased supply chain efficiencies, as evidenced by recent and escalating interest in using Advanced Shipping Notices (ASNs) and, now, sending radio frequency identification (RFID) data within ASNs via electronic data interchange (EDI).

“GXS Managed Services allows us to farm out specific areas of technical expertise and effort and all the associated headaches to GXS,” said Peter Johnson, senior business analyst responsible for Kerry Foods customer supply chain systems. ”Without GXS, we could have accomplished this ourselves, but our relatively small team would have been completely consumed in this effort for a considerable period of time. With GXS, we have been able to focus our time and energy on strategy, not the legwork. As a business, we are firmly of the view that smart deployment of technology and automation can deliver competitive advantage, and GXS Managed Services is no exception.”

Maintaining core business focus

A project in process last year EDI-enabled suppliers based in Ireland. Kerry Foods and GXS both immediately recognised the opportunity to utilise GXS’ on boarding and community management capabilities to quickly and painlessly move these trading partners to the Kerry Foods B2B trading infrastructure. As part of the project, GXS took on all aspects of this integration challenge, including the consultation, individual requirements and the enablement of each of the new trading partners.

According to Johnson, there are additional benefits that GXS Managed Services brings to Kerry Foods including technology diversification, ease-of-adoption and disaster recovery capabilities for its B2B trading environment. “It means that as customers push us into technologies such as Secure FTP and AS2, we have easy and ready access to expertise in these areas, without the need to maintain those skills in-house. Another benefit for us is in the area of disaster recovery, which has historically occupied a huge amount of our time and attention, reflecting the huge importance of e-trading to our business. GXS has the resource and scale as well as the technical know-how to take our disaster recovery planning and execution to the next level.”