Trading Partner Intelligence Service

Enabling the Perfect Order

In today's challenging economy, retailers must find new and more effective ways to manage their suppliers' performance as well as their own. As a result, many retailers are developing and expanding performance management and supplier scorecard programs.

SPS Commerce's Trading Partner Intelligence service helps retailers understand the "who, when, why, where and what" about which products and vendors are performing well or poorly. The service can then be used to improve your supply chain by managing vendors with solid metrics and key performance indicators such as the "Perfect Order". Unlike traditional software applications, it is delivered via an outsourced, SaaS model, minimizing risk, offering the fastest time-to-value and reducing the cost of ownership.

SPS Commerce's Trading Partner Intelligence service helps you evaluate vendor and product performance, identify outliers, and collaborate with vendors to improve sales and reduce costs. Your organization can:

• Gain greater visibility into vendor performance with detailed, actionable data
• Increase sales by reducing out-of-stock situations with better forecasting information
• Enforce online and offline business processes for greater vendor compliance
• Drive profitability by reducing product returns and damages
• Improve collaboration with vendors and enable continuous performance improvement
• Consolidate your vendor base and product assortment to focus on high-performing suppliers

Uniting Multiple Sources of Supply Chain Data

SPS Commerce has extensive experience accessing and integrating data from multiple trading partners and multiple IT systems. Our Trading Partner Intelligence service comes with pre-wired connections to more than 37,000 companies in the retail ecosystem, including suppliers, sourcing companies, carriers and 3PLs, and over 40 applications, including ERP, warehouse management and shipping/packing applications.

By bringing together multiple data sources, our service gives you a complete, end-to-end view of your supply chain.

An Outsourced, SaaS Alternative to Traditional Software

SPS Commerce's proven multi-tenant, business-to-business integration services offer a superior alternative to traditional software applications. Our outsourced approach allows you to stay focused on your core competencies rather than on installing and maintaining software.

Based on a multi-tenant architecture, our Trading Partner Intelligence service lets customers take advantage of common hardware, software and staffing resources to achieve superior reliability, faster implementations and lower total cost of ownership. Its SaaS architecture also allows multiple parties in the supply chain to access real-time data from any location via a standard Web browser.

A Wide Range of Interactive Data

SPS Commerce's Trading Partner Intelligence service makes supply chain data available for analysis anywhere in your organization, while providing the flexibility to view data in either summary dashboards or detailed "drill-down" formats. Its highly interactive design allows you to understand major issues, trends and underlying causes, down to the individual transaction.

Trading Partner Intelligence Modules for retailers include:

• Order Performance provides key performance indicators by vendor, product or region. The module evaluates the following:
  • Order Timeliness: analyzes which vendors are fulfilling orders on time by evaluating percentage of on-time deliveries.
  • Order Completeness: analyzes which vendors are shipping complete orders by calculating fill rate and cancelled order percentages.
  • Inbound Visibility: analyzes real-time order and shipment status and highlights exceptions for proactive intervention.
• EDI Compliance provides the ability to view not only how many vendors are doing EDI with you, but how well they are meeting your EDI specifications and requirements. You can view compliance by transaction type and vendor, and drill directly into the documents themselves.
• Point of Sale provides analytics and metrics designed to make better purchasing and replenishment decisions by identifying opportunities and trends that can be used to respond more proactively to consumer demand. Buyers and planners can analyze data from individual item level to customized product and vendor categories.
• Vendor Performance goes beyond traditional vendor scorecards with a comprehensive portal for vendors, which displays key performance data. Retailers give suppliers secure access to select data including daily dashboard metrics representing their scorecards. The service also includes exception-based alerts and reports to allow vendors to more proactively manage their performance against supplier expectations.

Integrating Trading Partners around the Globe

SPS Commerce has worked with more than 37,000 organizations to integrate their business systems and processes with trading partners. In our long history of working with CPG suppliers around the globe, we've built an extensive repository of data and best practices about how to improve supply chain visibility and efficiency. SPS Commerce's Trading Partner Intelligence service leverages our expertise in supply chain integration to deliver critical insight for optimizing supply chain operations and achieving bottom-line results.