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PathFinder Turns Black Friday Into Red Letter Day

About Exertis

Exertis is one of Europe’s largest and fastest growing technology distribution and specialist service providers, delivering innovative solutions and services across Supply Chain Services, Sales & Distribution, Marketing, PR and Digital services. Partnered with 400+ global technology brands and over 45,000 resellers, e-commerce operators and retailers across Europe, Exertis had a 2016/2017 turnover of £2.044 billion with 17% growth.

Exertis and Black Friday

So, distributing to some of the largest online and real-world technology retailers, and providing order fulfilment for many of its partners, you might expect the company to be a little busy over the Black Friday period.

You would not be wrong. Over a five day period, Exertis processed an average of 5,500 EDI messages per hour, 24/7, with each message containing multiple documents. Processing often exceeded 10,000 messages per hour and peaked on Wednesday evening at over 14,000 messages per hour. Messages include inbound orders, and related outbound documents such as invoices and despatch advice notes – all have to be identified, translated and routed correctly, forming a secure and reliable communications flow between trading partners and the Exertis ERP system.

Often, faced by such volumes of data, the EDI system can become a major bottleneck in a company’s data flow. But in 2016, Exertis installed a PathFinder Data Exchange Solution, from Orion Consulting Limited. PathFinder took the volume of data received over Black Friday and did what it does best – it processed it quickly and automatically while highlighting any errors in the data received, for immediate action.

Pathfinder has delivered on all aspects for EDI requirements. Quite simply it has enabled us to massively increase our EDI capability over recent weeks. We are now able to get more throughput than ever before, with greater visibility and the correct alerting.

The whole process around delivering EDI solutions is now much quicker and simpler thanks to Pathfinder. Not only is the software enabling us to do more the support we get from Orion is also first class.

Darren Yull, Director – Integration and Web Services, Exertis UK & Ireland

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Orion was chosen as the EDI system supplier for these projects as PathFinder provides all the connectivity required to communicate with our suppliers and customers with all the required EDI formats - out of the box. Orion have also listened to us and incorporated our requirements into subsequent releases of the PathFinder product.

The Orion team at all stages of the decision making, development and deployment of the PathFinder product instilled us with the necessary confidence that they knew their subject matter and were able to help guide and advise us to make the correct strategic decisions.

Darren Yull, Director – Integration and Web Services, Exertis UK & Ireland