Case Study: Nutrien Ag Solutions - Specialty Business Increases Efficiency with AgGateway’s Inventory Reporting File Format. Link to case study here.
Flat Format: To access the standard format, click here. (This is an AgGateway member wiki page; members can obtain passwords from Member Services.)
Article: Benefits of the AgGateway Inventory Reporting Flat File By Donald Green, EDI Systems Analyst, Nutrien Ag Solutions, November 2018
If you talk to retailers and small-to-medium distributors, the choices for inventory reporting in the past were to implement B2B integrations or to create dozens of custom spreadsheets each, with a format specific to the manufacturer or supplier. It takes considerable time to change the format and values being sent to each manufacturer’s specification. Some smaller manufacturers can’t implement XML at this time, so they either need to use a third party to receive reported inventory information, or they could use the flat-file format.
To solve this problem, retailers, distributors, manufacturers and software vendors across multiple AgGateway councils banded together to define a standard flat file format for inventory reporting. If you need to create inventory data manually, the standard includes a Microsoft Excel template, User Guide, and a Specification. For those with modest IT capabilities, your staff can easily implement software tooling to generate this one file format and satisfy the needs of dozens of manufacturers, suppliers and distributors.
The AgGateway Inventory Reporting File Format is a tab-delimited text file format for use by parties that are unable to implement the preferred method of reporting inventory electronically – AgGateway XML Inventory Actual Usage (IAU) messages sent over a B2B connection (e.g., ebMS/ebXML, AS/2, web services).
Nutrien started reporting the sales and inventory flat files to SePRO Corporation in October 2017. Nutrien also started reporting inventory flat files to Nufarm/TKXS in October 2017. We didn’t run into any issues. By adopting this standard, we have removed manual data entry from the reporting process, and we have seen fewer errors in inventory reporting. This resulted in labor savings, time savings, and a faster turnaround for inventory reconciliations and rebate payments.
This flat file really helped SePRO with its agency inventory. This is inventory that is owned by them, but physically is sitting at a Nutrien location.
Here in summary are benefits of using the new flat file:
The Benefits for Sending Party: Retailers and small-to-medium distributors benefit from the broad adoption by manufacturers and software providers. The ROI is clear:
The Benefits for Manufacturers and Software Providers: By supporting this standard format, manufacturers and suppliers benefit from a broad base of retailers and distributors who can easily support this format.
To access the standard format, click here. (This is an AgGateway member wiki page; members can obtain passwords from Member Services.)
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