Kerry Foods is using GXS Managed Services to help simplify, manage and run its complex B2B supply chain.
The company, which owns the Wall’s, Richmond, Bowyers, Dairygold, Kerrymaid, Mattessons and Homepride flour brands, said GXS Managed Services will improve customer support and its trading network’s security and disaster recovery.
Kerry Foods’ customers include Tesco, Asda, J.Sainsbury, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer.
“GXS Managed Services allows us to farm out specific areas of technical expertise,” said Peter Johnson, the senior business analyst responsible for Kerry Foods customer supply chain systems.
“We could have done things ourselves, but our relatively small team would have been completely consumed in this effort for a considerable period of time.”
GXS has already helped Kerry Foods to link suppliers in Ireland to a new electronic data interchange system. GXS managed the integration, including the consultation, individual requirements and the enablement of each of the new trading partners.
Johnson said 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,” he said.
In the area of disaster recovery, historically for Kerry Foods this has occupied a “huge amount of our time and attention, reflecting the huge importance of e-trading to our business”, said Johnson. “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.”
GXS Managed Services is underpinned by the GXS Trading Grid, a B2B Integration cloud computing platform.
In other trading platform news, DHL Supply Chain has just rolled out its new Live Order Tracking System (LOTS) in an attempt to improve supply chain efficiency. The system will provide real-time detailed order information and improve vehicle utilization, said the logistics firm.
