Fresh look at EDI

Australian financial software developer, JIWA Financials, has announced completion of the first implementation phase of its financial software solution at Harvey Fresh (1994) Ltd, a Western Australian producer of fruit juices, dairy goods and wines. Harvey Fresh purchased the software to adopt electronic data interchange (EDI) trading in response to requests from its major retail customers.

Harvey Fresh produces a wide range of products for local and export sales, including fruit and vegetable concentrates; freshly squeezed and long life juice products; fresh and long life milk products, yoghurt and cream; and wines. The company's products are stocked by some of Australia's largest retailers.

The project began in September 2006 with the installation of JIWA Financials and the JIWA Electro Business EDI bridge, for the first time allowing the company to share data between its financial and EDI systems.

According to Robert Musitano, business manager at Harvey Fresh, "To date we have implemented limited EDI functionality, purely to meet the initial requirements of our customers. However, we are already finding that the integration of both systems, plus the ease of communication between JIWA Financials and add-on software such as Crystal Reports and Microsoft Access, is very, very quick. JIWA has saved us around an hour in the sales/orders department every day. Admittedly, on the first day of going live we were delayed a couple of hours, but if that's as bad as it gets, that's not bad at all!"

In early 2007, a widespread implementation began, extending the use of EDI beyond invoicing, taking it into areas such as receipt of orders, warehouse operations and stock control as well as implementing EDI to more of is major customers.

David Simmonds, managing director of JIWA Financials added, "Many small to medium enterprises fail to reap the benefit of their EDI implementation. Having established EDI capabilities to conduct business with particular partners, they fail to integrate the data with the very backbone of their organisation - their financial systems. The management at Harvey Fresh understood this and worked closely with us to create an integrated solution that shares data, reducing duplication of data entry, minimising the opportunity for errors and creating significant cost benefits."