LIDL, Kaufland and STACKIT

One of Europe’s largest retail groups, which includes Lidl and Kaufland, processes over 60 million EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) documents every year. The old system for the electronic processing of business documents such as delivery bills and invoices involved a great deal of manual effort. Initial registration in the EDI system took a long time for each supplier. There was no standardized, group-wide EDI onboarding process. There were also no automated notifications in the workflow, which meant that the progress of the onboarding had to be checked proactively. The legacy system also required high infrastructure and hardware resources, had outdated documentation and was prone to errors, resulting in high development costs.

The requirements for a SELF EDI system were therefore manifold:

• Replacement of several legacy systems with high cost and personnel input
• Proportionality of the functionality of the software and its underlying infrastructure
• Long-term savings through reduction of development services
• Standardization of processes with sufficient flexibility to take into account special features such as specific EDI message types or different task assignments for different recipient groups

A cloud solution that supported the Schwarz Group’s strategic cloud-first approach was considered. SELF-EDI is based on the low-code platform Mendix, which runs on the sovereign STACKIT Cloud, which enabled a very fast implementation: it only took one year from kickoff to rollout. The application is an impressive example of how even more complex use cases can be successfully implemented with the low-code platform. With the help of SELF-EDI, suppliers can handle most of the process steps for onboarding to the EDI system independently. SELF-EDI also scores points with a workflow management system that sends status updates when action is required.

Status monitoring provides an overview of the progress of a supplier’s onboarding at all times. SELF-EDI on STACKIT is a scalable environment for dynamic requirements. It protects business secrets and personal data through maximum data sovereignty. It offers high automation and reduces the error rate at the same time. The registration of a supplier, which used to take several days, can now be carried out by suppliers independently and with minimal time expenditure via self-registration. In addition, suppliers can update their master data independently in the SELF EDI portal, which saves the departments a great deal of manual work.