Making Sense of EDI and POS Data

Retailers today collaborate with their manufacturers and distributors and share sales-related information in the hope of increasing profits. The most commonly shared data is that collected from the UPC at the cash register called Point of Sale (POS). POS data conveys sales measures ranging from units to actual currency scanned or breakdowns of promotional vs. regular sales activity. Some retailers have gone farther and share forecasting information and/or replenishment data (flags, reorder points) via the EDI 852, EDI 830 or EDI 867, a proprietary vendor portal such as Retail Link®, Workbench®, Partners OnLine®, VendorDart®, etc., EDIFACT, Tradacom, XML and other formats, as well as store and distribution center lists and even planograms, demographics, store clustering, ad plans, and more.

Common EDI transaction sets leveraged by Velocity include the following:

• EDI 852 - Point of Sale (POS) and Inventory Activity
• EDI 867 - Warehouse Withdrawls
• EDI 816 - Store Lists
• EDI 830 - Plan or Forecast Information

• Which stores are low on stock to support sales for the next 10 days?
• What are my top selling stores by style and color?
• Is the new product on the shelves?
• How are our planograms performing by store type?
• How did our ad or tradepromotion perform by market?
• Where are my sales below plan?
• What are the top selling regions by sales rep.?
• Is age or race a factor in sales?
• What is my PNL for each promotion?
• Where do SSO's need to be generated?

Retail Link, Workbench, Partners Online and VendorDart are registered trademarks of Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Sears Holding Corp., Target Corporation and Lowes, Inc., respectively. There are no implied endorsements by these retailers for Vendor Managed Technologies, Inc. or its solutions.