For 18 Years, This Enterprise Company Has Relied on Epicor EDI to Manage the Complexities of Their EDI Business Needs.
Genesco Inc. is a multi-national footwear company operating in the retail and wholesale spaces. Known best for their Journeys stores in the US, Little Burgundy in Canada, and Schuh stores in the UK, you’ll also see their Dockers, Levi’s, and Bass footwear brands in major US retailers.
When Genesco first implemented Epicor EDI (formerly 1 EDI Source), they were looking to transition from their custom-written mainframe electronic data interchange (EDI) system as their EDI manager was retiring. EDI Complete, the forerunner to Epicor EDI HeadQuarters (HQ), was chosen as the most flexible and modern solution on the Market. Now, 18 years later, Genesco continues to depend on the flexibility and reliability of Epicor EDI HQ for helping in managing the complexities of their EDI business needs.
Genesco operates more than 1,400 retail stores in addition to their wholesale business and Dockers, Levi’s, and Bass Footwear brands. They have a complex business and an equally challenging EDI landscape. Tim Bolton, Genesco's EDI manager, oversees a team of four who handles the entire company's EDI. With more than 700 trading partners and 450 EDI maps, they support 25 transaction types. They work with the standard EDI transaction sets (850, 856, 810, orders, ASN, Invoices, PO change) and less common transaction sets like point of sale, inventory, and logistics transactions (110s, 210s, 214s).
EDI is critical to the business, and we depend on Epicor EDI HQ as an effective tool to meet our EDI business requirements.
As an enterprise company with such a mature and robust EDI landscape, the need for reliable software is crucial. The company is 99% EDI capable with suppliers and has integrated EDI into many other aspects of their business, from their label maker to ocean carriers.
“EDI is critical to the business, and we depend on Epicor EDI HQ as an effective tool to meet our EDI business requirements.” -Tim Bolton, EDI Manager.
When Bolton started at Genesco in 2004, they were just implementing Epicor EDI, moving from their mainframe system to an on-premises solution. Keeping EDI in-house allows the company, and Bolton’s team, total control over their EDI environment and was a logical progression from their previous solution. Despite processing challengingly large amounts of translation data with their numerous trading partners, Epicor EDI HQ performs reliably. It offers them an affordable solution that meets their needs and integrates well within their company.
With Epicor EDI HQ, Genesco can meet their customers' mapping requirements and requests. All mapping is handled in-house by Bolton's team, and even though the mapping is the hardest part of setting up EDI properly, "It's a fairly intuitive and easy to understand mapping methodology,” Bolton says.
The learning curve for new team members has been drastically reduced thanks to Epicor EDI. They quickly get acquainted with the Epicor EDI HQ system and learn that the rich complexities of Genesco's business offer challenges. With so many trading partners and their internal divisions, Bolton finds that more time is spent training new EDI team members on their complex business practices than on how to use the software itself.
In 2016 Genesco chose to add on Epicor EDI IntelligentXchange (IX), our cloud-based visibility, reporting, and analytics software. "We were looking for a way to empower our internal users, especially to be able to do EDI research without having to come to us all the time," said Bolton. IX helps internal users across Genesco's logistics, customer service, distribution center, and eCommerce teams to access real-time information without requiring EDI expertise. They can research and troubleshoot problems themselves.
The eCommerce team has realized the biggest impact where knowing the timing of orders is crucial. The fact that they can look up information and address issues themselves helps alleviate time-sensitive matters and reduce the workload for the EDI team.
Bolton describes EDI as a “showstopper, mission-critical system” for the company, and with Epicor EDI, they can maintain their current environment. Genesco continues to rely on the flexibility of Epicor EDI HQ as they change requirements. As they expand their logistics connections, they depend on its ease of use. The software continues to grow with them and meet their business needs.
