This morning several people rang me up to say that supermarkets are looking into EDI with newsagents.
I confess I was stunned about this but if my clients are interested then I must find out. So we rang up Coles and arranged for a meeting with their B2B group to discuss it.
To ask them were they discussing newsagents with anyone?
Answer was NO.
I then asked was it worth doing?
This needed a long answer which can be accurately summarized as NO.
The problem is the Coles B2B goes from a central buyer to six hundred supermarkets and many other shops such as Coles Express. So now EDI orders are sent from Cole’s central or regional office to a supplier who then delivers it to a picking location.
Currently all newsagents’ items are considered to being orders sent from a local supermarket. There is no facility for such local orders to be sent to the newsagent by EDI assuming the newsagent had access to this EDI gateway.
As Coles do not intend to change their systems in the next few years to handle local orders, so they do not see any use of a local newsagent being able use the Coles EDI systems.
