High-percentage B2B data interchange: The Berentzen Group outsources its entire EDI communications to Mercoline.

Leading spirits manufacturer Berentzen discards its converter solution in favor of Mercoline’s Communications Services for its electronic business partner communication, resulting in lower costs and increased flexibility for the Berentzen Group.

Berentzen has been using the Mercoline communications platform CS.Line for its ATLAS customs document exchange since 2008. Only one year later, it entered into an agreement for Mercoline to take on all of its EDI communications.

What brought this about? Berentzen has been exchanging a broad range of its business data electronically with business partners for many years. Such data consist primarily of order data (ORDERS), dispatch notifications (DESADV) or invoices (INVOIC) with its B2B customers, but also of other notifications such as delivery orders (IFTMIN) or goods handling messages (HANMOV) with logistics providers. Berentzen operated its own EDI converter for this purpose. In recent years, the quantity and complexity of its business partner connections has consistently increased to the point that it was obvious the old converter solution would not be up to the challenges of the future. The associated rising costs for maintenance, updates and training prompted Berentzen’s management to decide at the end of 2008 to acquire a new converter. At the same time, make-or-buy considerations led to a call for bids from a number of EDI outsourcing providers.

“In the end the decision was clear: Mercoline had the most highly developed and simultaneously most affordable solution. We are an SAP applications operation, and it was equally important to us that as a certified SAP partner, Mercoline has the know-how necessary for the integration into our processes,” says Wilhelm Heyen, Director of ERP Applications and Development with the Berentzen Group.

Although the agreement was only concluded in November 2009, the implementation of the Berentzen in-house system on the Mercoline Communications Platform CS.Line was almost completed at the end of January 2010. A coordinated procedure model was used to link up the Berentzen SAP system via IDoc templates to the Mercoline systems and more than 20 business partners. Some 30 different business partner profiles were set up in only a few weeks. Subsequently, around 70% of all Berentzen’s business processes are already being conducted with Mercoline at present, enabling Berentzen to shut down its old systems on schedule.

Thanks to the changeover to the Mercoline EDI-Service CS.EDI, Berentzen is able to increasingly use more affordable communication channels like AS2. At the same time, the flexibility and speed in the connection of new partners and the implementation of previously unrealized messaging formats is growing. In this way, Mercoline is vitally active in supporting the growing needs of a dynamic company like the Berentzen Group. Wilhelm Heyen explains, “Lots of providers promise long-term cost reduction. But at Mercoline, the costs for partner profiles and operations are genuinely transparent and reasonable. This allows us to reliably calculate the cost savings right from the start.”

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