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JapaneseCommunity management is a complex and challenging set of activities that requires effective collaboration from multiple teams to ensure success. Outreach, communications, testing, and enablement are the key components for any successful EDI onboarding initiative. Add to this global supply chain communities, and the hurdles of implementation become even more challenging as local languages, local specifications, and differing time zones create additional layers of complexity. Failing at any one of these can jeopardize your initiative.
Community Management
DiCentral’s Community Management (CM) Team is made up of global subject matter experts from a range of disciplines offering you a standard, fast and easy way to connect with your trading partners.
The job of onboarding, communicating, testing, enabling, managing and expanding your B2B trading partner community rests entirely on DiCentral. Additionally, the solution delivers insightful business intelligence allowing for informed decision making, enhancing the collaborative relationship between buyers and sellers, shortening time to market lead times, and ultimately driving revenue.
The Community Management Team is led by a seasoned Project Manager who will advise and consult with you on your implementation, and will apply industry best practices to support your pre and post production processes.
Additionally the PM will:
- Develop and initiate an enablement plan for your trading community which meets your goals, objectives, constraints, timeline and budget
- Assist in the execution and monitoring of the community enablement activities
- Report on status, manage exceptions, and keep stakeholders updated
- Set expectations for you and your trading partners, while achieving high customer satisfaction
- Act as the single point of contact for the implementation and orchestrate all activities between the various teams to deliver your project on time and within budget
Customer Onboarding
Customer-facing implementations present a unique set of challenges. Every customer has predefined business processes and a set of trading documents that they require. As a result, it often leaves companies in the position of struggling to meet their customers’ needs. Failure to comply can mean penalties, deductions or even loss of business. The DiCentral Community Management Team will work with you to:
- Gather your customers’ requirements, business rules and EDI guidelines
- Model your customers’ business rules and automate alerts to identify issues that might lead to non-compliant events
- Map and transform your customers’ data so that your ERP can accept the data and respond with the proper transactions
- Perform all testing that your customers may dictate
- Establish all communications ensuring that data can be transmitted securely and error free
- Manage communications and status of the testing to “go-live”
- Manage the transition from preproduction to postproduction
Vendor Onboarding
Enabling vendors can be equally challenging as you optimize your company’s supply chain. The Information Technology (IT) sophistication inside your supplier community will vary dramatically, which will require different tactics and solutions to enable 100% of the supply chain.
DiCentral has a variety of solutions that make the process easier, from handling a vendor’s sophisticated integration implementations to those vendors who have no full-time IT staff, a limited IT budget and predominantly rely on email and fax for business communications. In order for your vendor community to be B2B enabled there are several items that need resolution. They are:
- Defining the business processes that are going to be automated
- Creating EDI guidelines for your suppliers
- Documenting any associated business rules or compliance programs
- Developing the communications plan for the suppliers
- Categorizing the supplier base by priorities
- Building the team of constituents that will aid in the adoption of inter-organizational change
- Resubmit transactions for processing
The Community Management team will assist in these activities and provide insight on best practices. Once the above items have been created, the team will then initiate and manage the following tasks:
- Execute vendor campaign
- Test and certify vendors
- Update the Community Management portal on the status of each vendor
- Assist and coordinate the cutover from testing to production for each vendor
Community Management is an integral component of DiCentral’s Managed Services. With it, customers will simplify integration complexity; reduce the time and cost of trading partner implementation; optimize resource allocation on other critical tasks; and increase trading partner communication, collaboration and satisfaction.
Complete EDI Outsourcing Solution
DiCentral’s enterprise-class cloud EDI platform offers a cost-effective alternative to in-house solutions. It is defined by six key traits: availability, security, scalability, adaptability, accountability, and reliability.
In addition to Community Management, DiCentral’s EDI Outsourcing solution includes:
Our Clients. Their Stories.
DiCentral has alleviated our stress and worry around EDI. Without partners like DiCentral to help us facilitate these technologies and deploy the integration, we wouldn’t be where we are today, quite honestly.
– Matt Lok, IT Manager
Marklyn Group
