SEEBURGER UK has announced that Tetley, one of the world’s largest tea brands, has selected the SEEBURGER Business Integration Server to handle all new B2B and EDI integration projects and to help manage the company’s complex and diverse global supply chain. Initial projects have seen SEEBURGER help Tetley significantly improve efficiency and save costs by delivering seamless AS2 integration with ASDA.

 

Paul Kay, Tetley Group’s Business Systems Manager, comments, “The Tetley Group’s supply chain operations vary in each country and the company has a long term objective to reduce costs and increase profitability by consolidating all subsidiaries to a common IT and communications system. We are looking to create an IT department and communications hub that serves the business regardless of geography. Our technical infrastructure needs to be highly focused on established standards and we are continually looking to implement business applications that assist this strategy. The recent selection of the SEEBURGER B2B Integration Server is a major and important step towards achieving this.”

 

Tetley is currently working towards migrating all its existing integration to SEEBURGER from the previous system. “The limitations of the previous system have constrained our use of EDI over the last few years. The migration to SEEBURGER broadens our capability, which is set to give us significant efficiency and related cost savings,” says Paul Kay, adding, “For us, the key to a successful migration is that it is as seamless as possible to the outside world. During the cutover we don’t want our customers and suppliers to be impacted in any way, SEEBURGER allows us to do this successfully.”

 

The search for a new B2B integration tool that could meet the company’s key criteria led to an exhaustive evaluation of many of the top players in the industry. Jo Puri, IT Consultant for the Tetley Group explains why SEEBURGER was selected, “SEEBURGER’s technology platform is ideal for Tetley.  It has quality in place throughout the system and this can be found in its processes, adapters and workflow capabilities. We also developed a good working relationship with the people at SEEBURGER who are very knowledgeable and capable of providing a high level of support and resources to ensure our requirements are met in a professional and timely manner.”

 

The first project for SEEBURGER was to help Tetley deliver AS2 integration with ASDA inside a tight deadline set by the customer. This solution went live in just six weeks and within the customers deadline. The information exchange with ASDA over AS2 covers orders, invoicing, reconciliations and debits and has to have in-built safeguards that monitor transactions and quickly highlights and responds to any failures. “We worked really well with SEEBURGER to build the adapters required to match ASDA’s processes with ours inside the deadline. The new system has also increased the speed with which we get information into our systems, from anything up to half a day previously, down to just half an hour. This helps us to utilise this information faster throughout our business,” says Jo Puri, IT Consultant for the Tetley Group.

 

Additional projects include mapping relevant processes into electronic documents suitable for submission to the Inland Revenue and the development of a capability to handle high value in-bound invoices electronically. Paul Kay adds, “The Inland Revenue project shows that we can integrate data with anyone, not just customers and suppliers. This integration has significantly increased the speed and accuracy with which our human resources and finance departments can communicate mandatory information with the Inland Revenue.”

 

Paul Kay concludes, “SEEBURGER has delivered much more than we ever envisaged. It has generated significant savings in the business by allowing us to build processes and then use them elsewhere, thereby removing replication and saving time. As the Group moves to a more global approach to IT management, SEEBURGER has become a key application tool for us because it can help ensure that processes are carried out consistently, accurately and cost-effectively throughout the business, but managed from a central location. SEEBURGER makes our long term plan for a consolidated global IT system a very achievable reality.”

 

 

SEEBURGER is a leading provider of global business integration solutions designed to optimize transactions throughout the extended enterprise by automating trading relationships with all partners regardless of their size and technical resources.  Launched in 1986 to provide integration solutions to the automotive industry in Germany, the company today is ranked among the top business-to-business gateway providers by top industry analysts, and serves more than 6,500 customers in 35 countries and more than 15 industries through its flagship B2B Gateway and related products and services. SEEBURGER has global offices in Europe, Asia Pacific and North America, including a U.S. office that opened in 1998.

 

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