CASE STUDYGreen Supply Slashes EDI Costs 90
Percent by Moving EDI from a VAN toCData Arc
Helping retailers succeed both online and in brick & mortar stores, Green Supply is a wholesale
distributor of 45,000+ hunting, fishing, camping, and sporting goods from a network of 300 top
manufacturers.
Through solid customer service, good pricing, and deep inventory beyond the standard big box
products, Green Supply’s focus is supplying retailers, ecommerce businesses, and dropshippers
the products they need to grow their businesses. Green Supply uses a combination of advanced
technology and EDI to provide its customers added value. Green Supply supports:•Dropshipping for dealers•“Just Arrived” inventory•

Order status notifications•

Wish Lists•

And more

But EDI wasn’t always a strategic asset for Green Supply.

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The Background: Starting with a Value Added NetworkIn 2011, Green Supply had its first experience with EDI when it received a request from a major
customer, SCHEELS All Sports, which is one of the nation's largest sporting goods retailers. Likemany Green Supply customers at that time, SCHEELS was faxing purchase orders (POs), but
SCHEELS wanted to standardize exchanges with Green Supply and requested a move to EDI.

Being entirely new to EDI at the time, Green Supply needed a platform and service-provider tominimize technical setup.

Green Supply started off with SPS Commerce, which is a value added network (VAN) that handles
EDI processing through a web portal. Green Supply's team and its partners, such as SCHEELS,
would load documents into the VAN portal, manually adding information into a web form. The VAN
would then transmit documents between Green Supply and its partners.

For 7 years, Green Supply used the SPS Commerce VAN with data entry into web forms. Though
it was manual, the process worked well enough at the start; however, as Green Supply grew andadded more customers who required EDI, the structural drawbacks of processing each document
through a service-provider became too much to ignore.

The Challenge: High Costs & Manual Processes with a VAN
In early 2018, Green Supply found itself processing more than 20,000 EDI messages a month while
manually sending and receiving messages through a web form on the SPS Commerce VAN EDI.
This high-touch, manual process not only took significant time and energy to manage, but eachone of those 20,000 messages incurred a transaction fee as well.

CData Software | Green Supply 								2CASE STUDY"In the beginning it made sense, but we were getting to where the bill was about $100,000 a year
through SPS Commerce," said David Kurz, National Accounts Manager (and former IT Director) forGreen Supply.
Three factors were driving costs sky high:•Volume: Green Supply was sending more documents as they added EDI partners, and the VAN
charged a per-document fee.

•Limits: The VAN added a fee for exceeding transaction volume limits.

•Eroding Profit Margins: Sales orders required several document exchanges (at a cost of 30
cents/document), which ate up profit margins for smaller orders.

"We broke down what we were spending per document," said Luke Patchett, Technical Lead for
EDI at Green Supply. “In some cases, based on profit margins, we were actually losing money toprocess through EDI."
Then, there were technical difficulties.
As Green Supply moved more of its transactions to EDI, the company started processing largescale orders and found that it was sending so many SKUs that the EDI transactions weren't getting
properly processed. Green Supply had to start splitting files into pieces, which slowed down thewhole process and created a backlog of EDI transactions.
The pileup of unprocessed transactions directly impacted how much inventory Green Supply would
stock at any given time.

“I just see it as a natural evolution. Go to aVAN, they hold your hand, then, you moveon to running your own stuff.”— David Kurz, National Accounts Manager, Green Supply.

"We were in a situation withsome customers," Patchett said,“We were in low stock quantities
because we couldn't keep up withEDI."The SPS Commerce VAN
platform was a good fit for Green
Supply when the company beganwith EDI, as Green Supply had
minimal EDI volume, and its

customers had varying requirements.
But due to the high costs and technical challenges of processing high transaction volumes, Green
Supply had simply outgrown VANs. Green Supply needed a more robust, cost-effective EDI solutionthat could scale with it.

The Solution: An Automated, Easy-to-Use EDI Solution
In 2018, Green Supply started searching for a software solution and tested out a whole list ofCData Software | Green Supply 								

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options that met several key criteria. The solution needed to:•have been tested & proven for years.

•be able to get Green Supply up and running in a timely manner.

•

work seamlessly with the FTP, CSV-based system Green Supply used for non-EDI customers.

•

significantly reduce EDI transaction costs.

•come with exceptional support.

After conducting thorough testing
on a whole list of options, Green
Supply found that one solution
stood out from the rest. GreenSupply ultimately selected CData
Arc and worked with a systems
integrator to quickly get CData Arc
fully operational for Green Supply’s
EDI processing.

The Results: Efficiency
in the Supply Chain
Green Supply now has a functional
EDI system built to handle its full suite of EDI needs.
Green Supply now uses CData Arc to translate and map documents from all of the major EDI
standards its partners use, and Green Supply can receive documents via a variety of messaging
protocols such as AS2. CData Arc also integrates with Green Supply’s FTP, CSV-based system,
which simplifies Green Supply’s processing on the back-end.
“Now, we translate everything into a format that our system understands. People can send any kindof document to us, X12, plain text files, CSVs” Patchett said.
Additionally, CData Arc’s support has more than met Green Supply’s needs.
“CData Arc seemed to be a breath of fresh air. When mistakes were made (during initial setup), they
were quickly addressed,” Patchett said “The customer is always right at CData Arc.”Green Supply has enjoyed rapid implementation, completing two CData Arc integrations in a montheach with Amazon and Amazon Dropship, which are two of Green Supply’s biggest sources of EDItransactions. This is warp speed compared with the VAN.
“We’ve finished two major EDI transaction platforms in 1 month each, as compared with the 3-4

CData Software | Green Supply 								4months it took to set up similar projects through SPS Commerce,” Patchett said.
Today, CData Arc handles 90-95 percent of EDI traffic at any given time. The VAN is only usedfor low-EDI-volume customers. In addition to saving time on a manual process via seamlessintegration, CData Arc directly cuts Green Supply’s EDI costs.
“We’re going to start saving about $90,000 annually,” said Kurz.
That’s a savings of over 90 percent on EDI.

CData Software is the real-time data connectivity company. Our connectivity solutions provide easy access to live data fromhundreds of on-premises and cloud applications. Consumable by any user, accessible within any application, and built for all
enterprises, CData is redefining data-driven business.

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