Sainsbury's selects Wesupply for supplier B2B services

Filed in archive News on July 31, 2009

According to a new release by Manufacturing and Logistics IT, Sainsbury's has selected Wesupply as the business-to-business (B2B) platform for connectivity to its 4,000 suppliers. Wesupply will work with IBM to provide a complete outsourced solution to Sainsbury's, and upgrade existing supplier connections to boost the visibility into, and monitoring of, critical information flows.

Sainsbury's trades electronically with most of its suppliers but uses multiple solutions. By selecting Wesupply, Sainsbury's will not only consolidate onto a single B2B platform but significantly improve visibility into critical supply chain processes. The platform enables integration with supplier back-office systems; provides checking and validation of content against business rules of all messages exchanged between Sainsbury's and suppliers and will generate alerts in the event of errors or delays. This additional visibility benefits both Sainsbury's and its suppliers by streamlining the exchange of orders, shipping information and invoices in support of the delivery of product from supplier to distribution centre or store.

The Wesupply platform operates on the IBM e-business Hosting infrastructure. IBM will manage the implementation and maintenance of the service, while managing the migration of suppliers onto the system. "Sainsbury's has been a long-term user and proponent of electronic trading with suppliers and by selecting Wesupply and IBM will upgrade and extend this capability for the benefit of both Sainsbury's and its suppliers," said Tim Goalen, Director of Supply Chain Operations, at Sainsbury's. "As part of the Sainsbury's 'real-time supply chain' initiative we are seeking to transition all of our suppliers onto Wesupply's innovative trading network."

Through the use of the new system suppliers will have the ability to exchange data with Sainsbury's automatically, using electronic data interchange, or manually using a web browser, all via the Wesupply platform. The platform will also enable suppliers to check the status of specific messages, as well as manually submit shipping information (ASNs) and print barcode labels to attach to shipments. Sainsbury's will use Wesupply as a management dashboard for key performance indicators relating to the order-to-cash cycle.