Challenge
Buske is in the midst of enormous growth, leading to the expansion of their warehouse footprint by over 35% in just 18 months. When a new customer comes on board it has ripple effects on the entire infrastructure. Managing more inventory and truck rolls isn’t just about physical equipment; warehouse management systems (WMS) often require changes to support specific account requirements and processes. Buske’s hypergrowth has at times challenged its IT team to keep pace. Because each warehouse may serve a different set of trading partners or may contain goods requiring unique handling, the team must be nimble. “The planning, training, and implementation surrounding even a single location changing their WMS can be extremely large, to say nothing of doing so across 16 sites in different areas of the country,” notes Jason Rexford, Director of Automotive Operations for Buske.
This challenge extends beyond Buske’s own infrastructure, due to the industry’s heavy reliance on electronic data interchange (EDI) to orchestrate far-flung supply chains, drive efficiency, and provide visibility into operations. While the WMS is the system of record for transactional activity, EDI is the tool that moves information between component manufacturers, Buske, and buyers. Similar to the unique WMS requirements, each party usually has specific EDI needs related to their own internal procedures and systems. To drive profitable growth and deliver better customer experiences, Buske’s leadership continuously focuses on increasing automation and leveraging the expertise of partners. Buske sells complete supply chain solutions, and while they had already outsourced EDI process management, their existing vendor was struggling to deliver the services and solutions that their trading partners needed.
Because of its criticality, Buske considered in-house EDI solutions. They needed a better solution to ensure efficient growth as well as customer satisfaction and retention, but given the overall trajectory of the business they realized that executing such a large project and acquiring the needed expertise was unrealistic. As a result, Buske chose Rocket Software’s managed EDI product, Rocket EDX, as the upgrade from their existing solution.
Rocket EDX is a widely used EDI solution, which meant Rocket Software was already familiar with many of the requirements of Buske’s trading partners. The flexibility of Rocket EDX allows for tailored solutions supporting each partner and customer, as well as for each document type/data transmission. Similarly, Rocket’s experience with WMS tools was also key to the implementation, and the team quickly mapped the customer data into Buske’s WMS systems, and then into the required EDI transactions.
The cut-over was seamless and required only minimal effort by Buske’s IT team, at the same time positioning them to be much more agile and responsive to new business opportunities.
Results
Though in the past Buske’s EDI tools challenges their ability to grow and support clients efficiently, Rocket EDX and the partnership with Rocket’s service team allows Buske to manage its growth and respond more quickly to customers.
“The Rocket team is easily accessible around the clock, timely with responses, and knowledgeable about the actions that need to be taken to resolve issues,” states Jason Rexford, Director of Automotive Operations. “Recently there was an issue where EDI did not flow from our WMS properly, due to a DNS issue. This specific instance was extremely time-sensitive. We were able to contact the Rocket team and transmit the file to them manually, and they were able to format it for successful processing within the allotted timeframe.”
Buske finds that EDI-supported processes cost 20% to 40% less than their manual alternatives (which can also be much less reliable). For EDI-supported customers and transactions, Buske’s customer service team leverages role-based dashboards to keep an eye on activity and to proactively resolve any discrepancies.