Toying with Success? Global EDI is Coming.

by | Mar 6, 2020 | Business Growth, Order Fulfillment, Order Management, Suppliers, Supply Chain

It’s the dream of every consumer goods business owner. Demand for your product is making headlines across Australia, the United States (U.S.) and around the globe. This was the case with Moose Toys. They are the Australian family-run business that shook up the toy industry with the global phenomenon Shopkins.

In 2014, the company made the news when sales were so hot, they sold out of more than six million Shopkins figures in four months. They became one of the hottest collectible toys that holiday season and it was only the beginning.

Recently, Target and other Australia and U.S. retailers have named Shopkins as one of their top toys for 2020, and Good Housekeeping tagged them one of the hottest toys of 2019.

So, how did this Australia company keep up with the growing popularity of its products across the globe? As you’ll see, EDI played a key role.

Crossing borders with global EDI

The toy company had EDI operations with its major Australian retailers well under control. But, when their global expansion plans with U.S. retailers and other markets took off, their global EDI and other systems needed an upgrade. They began looking for an EDI solution that would:

  • Support their global EDI needs with U.S. retailers and others
  • Provide local support in Australia, the U.S., and beyond
  • Have existing relationships with current and future retail customers
  • Remove manual processes
  • Integrate with their newly selected ERP, Oracle JD Edwards

This search brought them to SPS Commerce with offices in their primary markets, including Australia, the U.S., Europe and China. Also, SPS had relationships with most major Australian and U.S. retailers making it easy for them to support the growing number of retailers carrying Shopkins and Moose Toys’ other toys.

“SPS Commerce offers Moose Toys a flexible solution as well as local support in Australia and the U.S. to manage our global EDI operations. Their scalable EDI solution integrated with our JD Edwards ERP and their global EDI network was already working with 90 percent of our retail partners.”

-Ben Dart, COO, Moose Toys

 Automating with new Australia and U.S. retailers

Today, when Moose signs with a new retailer, the value of the relationship to their business is largely unknown. In most instances, Moose elects to automate EDI operations with the retailer using the SPS Fulfillment web portal until order volumes can be determined.Once the relationship has matured and orders are increasing, Moose will further automate the retailer’s EDI by integrating directly into their ERP solution.

Deploying an ERP and EDI across continents (at the same time!)

The company was deploying a new ERP, JD Edwards, and decided to include SPS Commerce Fulfillment for EDI in the same roll out.  Ben Dart, Chief Operating Officer at Moose Toys shared:

“Our EDI project was complex. It spanned multiple continents, several third parties and our business needed it to go well. SPS experts worked alongside our internal team, JD Edwards and our integration partner. The implementation ran very smoothly and was well-orchestrated. It was an excellent display of international coordination as we rolled out 35 retail partners on EDI at the same time, along with our new ERP.” 

If your product sales are going up, it’s time to learn from other global suppliers who know what it takes to survive and grow into a worldwide phenomenon. Read the Moose Toys case study and see how they used EDI to support their cross-continent growth.

SPS Commerce Blog Team
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