SCENARIO 1: Stock and inventory figures are flowing heavily between all parties
SOLUTION: To avoid a lot of data conversion, column moving and VLOOKUP’s, vendors usually utilizes its market position to enforce fixed reporting templates.
The problem with this is, that the reporting templates for the Vendors are not the same between vendors, which means resellers and distributors have to spend a lot of time fitting their data to the templates, which causes many to not report at all.
We solve this by offering resellers and distributors one simple point of reporting for some or all sales and inventory data. The data can be delivered in virtually any format (.csv, .txt, EDI, Excel etc.), and the data supplier instructs Appendo on who should receive what data once for all. The reseller/distributor can now route requests from vendors directly to Appendo.
SCENARIO 2: No common format is used.
SOLUTION: If we assume that all the sales and inventory figures is delivered to the vendor in a fixed format, the vendor now faces the next problem: If it utilizes multiple distributors and these offer the products to the same resellers, there is a chance that Distributor 1 will report selling 1 pc. “XX-YYYY” to “Reseller 1” at a price of 100 EUR and Distributor 2 will report selling 1 pc. “XXYYYY” to “Reseller_1” at a price of 745 DKK. It is the same product and price – with small variances in how it is being reported. WE can easily pass your data on as e.g. Excel – just as we can change columns and headlines to match the vendor preference. Should the vendor at some point want to change their reporting template, Appendo will just change the export filter and no distributors/resellers will be troubled or affected in any way.
SCENARIO 3: Even with fixed reporting templates, the vendor still does a huge load of data cleaning.
SOLUTION: Even with fixed reporting templates, the vendor still maintains a HUGE workload in doing data cleaning. And as this process is done on vendor level, Vendor 2 will not benefit from any work done by Vendor 1. Now, as we already do conversions and mappings on products, customers, barcodes, currencies, postcodes and much more for a widespread customer base, we can do this centralized before the data reaches vendor level – effectively enabling all vendors to benefit from work done only once.
