Barfoots of Botley tastes the benefit of outsourced EDI with Wesupply

Barfoots of Botley, European processor and packer of fresh sweetcorn products, has switched to OneTime, Wesupply's fully managed Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) service, to improve the speed, ease and cost effectiveness of trading electronically with its major clients, leading UK food retailers.

Barfoots had on-premise PC based EDI solutions, however as the company grew and received additional customer EDI mandates they proved unstable and consumed large amounts of internal management resource. The solutions also lacked the scalability and modern EDI capabilities increasingly required to trade effectively with major supermarkets.

Wesupply's fully managed service will automate the exchange of critical business documents, including orders, invoices and ASN's between Barfoots and  key clients such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Ocado, ASDA, Costco and The Co-operative reducing the need for internal EDI skills. Advanced EDI features such as support for all required message formats and connection options, full message monitoring and concurrent user logins provide the scalability and flexibility that the company require.

Alex Spragg, IT Manager at Barfoots said, "The volume of transactions and the fast pace of supplying fresh produce to major supermarkets makes effective EDI a cornerstone of our business' IT infrastructure. Outsourcing to Wesupply allows us to future proof our requirements, minimise our internal costs and benefit from Wesupply's experience and expertise in connecting with our customers".

Ben Holmes, Sales Executive at Wesupply, said, "Barfoots realises the importance of EDI and the need to have a highly available service, however like many fresh produce companies it needs to focus its attention on its core business. Wesupply's managed service enables Barfoots to fully benefit from EDI, whilst freeing up internal IT resources".

Barfoots joins a growing number of fresh produce suppliers using the Wesupply solution to trade electronically with their customers, including Berry Gardens, Produce World and Vitacress. Leading retailers including Sainsbury's and Screwfix also effectively manage their supply chains using Wesupply's intelligent EDI solution to trade with their suppliers.