OREANDA-NEWS. September 12, 2011.  "Lenta" hypermarkets chain has been actively introducing EDI technologies (electronic document interchange) in work with its suppliers. Currently "Lenta" has over 1300 active suppliers, of which 80 % receive orders only in EDI system, while 40 % of suppliers use electronic copy of shipping advice (DESADV).

"Lenta" monthly sends and receives about 155 000 documents with the aid of the EDI system, and this figure is constantly growing with the increase of the number of suppliers who understand the EDI benefits.

 Nowadays, all hypermarkets of "Lenta" chain work with EDI system, which allows to reduce the time of acceptance considerably and, as a consequence, to reduce suppliers' forwarding costs, increase productivity and quality of the goods acceptance. For example, if an order of 150 SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) is supplied, acceptance of goods currently takes no more than 1 hour, whereas it took 3-4 hours earlier.

Since July 1, 2011 "Lenta" has successfully launched another new document - RECADV (notification on acceptance). 100 suppliers who promptly receive information on the dates of arrival and acceptance of orders, quantity of accepted goods and reasons of revealed discrepancies, have already been involved in the system. Based on this timely information, suppliers can improve quality of their own business processes, submitting correct invoices to "Lenta", without the need of any additional, "paper-based", approvals. The new document is connected to all the new suppliers in the general package among with the documents ORDER (order), RETANN (order for return) and DESADV (shipping advice).

 In the nearest future Lenta’s managers plan to introduce the INVOICE document (electronic invoice copy), already prepared for testing. Besides, several other documents will be introduced, for example, VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory — stocks controlled by supplier) which will allow suppliers to form orders for "Lenta" independently. That means that the supplier will be able to form the order himself, based on the information on the remaining stock and volume of sold goods, which he receives from "Lenta" on a daily basis.

"LENTA" works in the system of electronic document circulation EDI (ECOD) from 2004. It was then that test connections of first suppliers for dispatch of orders have been made. Since then EDI-stream in "Lenta" has not only increased many times, but has become diverse by types of EDI-documents. Basic development of EDI system began in 2008 when the project has been “revived” and inspiringly launched anew.

2008 became the beginning of mass connection of suppliers who deliver to the Distribution centre of the company (DC), to ORDER document exchange, and more than 500 DC suppliers now receive this electronic document. In the same year DESADV document (shipping advice) with the use of pallet identifier has been successfully tested and introduced – SSCC code, allowing to reduce the acceptance time considerably (up to 50 %). The document has been introduced for 150 "Lenta" DC suppliers.

 To promote mutually beneficial cooperation with its suppliers, "Lenta" has made the strategic decision to maintain free of charge incoming traffic for all of its partners in the year 2008.