Electronic data exchange with Markant

The Markant Group works with more than 14,000 industrial and around 150 retail partners across Europe, most recently generating total sales of 109.1 billion euros. The company is represented at ten locations in nine countries (Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, and China), with further locations in the pipeline. In addition, the target markets of Denmark, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia are served by the Markant national subsidiaries in Germany and Austria.

Markant offers its partners a wide range of services and solutions to support and optimize supply chain processes in day-to-day operations. Through its multilingual B2B online platform markant.net, the Group provides extensive IT-supported services in the areas of master data management, market research, and quality management. With its EDI services, Markant supports the electronic exchange of data between its industrial partners and Markant’s trading partners. EDI message types such as Orders, Delivery notes, or Invoices are cleared by means of a high-availability EDI cluster system.

Markant today plays an important role for producers of food and consumer goods throughout Europe, serving as a central EDI hub for handling a wide range of digital business processes as well as electronic data exchange on the customer side with an increasing number of market-dominating companies.

By creating value-added services and acting as a central regulator for a large number of small and medium-sized companies in Germany, Markant has also increasingly positioned itself as a strategic partner for well-known retail chains and larger corporate conglomerates. The character of the services offered was predestined for digitizing the underlying basic business processes and increasing the depth of added value through stringent use of EDI technologies. So Markant Germany could well be described as the nucleus of the Markant Group’s current pan-European service portfolio.

The following reflects only a small sample of the projects carried out within the Softzoll customer portfolio. All processes are also subject to continuous change and reorganization, and may therefore not be complete.

Currently, the most common EDI processes based on EDIFACT formats of a direct EDI connection with Markant Germany to supply the connected SMEs are:

With increasing globalization, Markant logically began to expand the services it offers to other European countries and began to set up a number of national subsidiaries. A large part of the EDI exchanges are carried out directly with the respective Markant subsidiary but can also be taken over by another national subsidiary. Depending on this, some business processes for different national subsidiaries can be covered on a technical level by a uniform EDI integration; other cases require divergent EDIFACT formats, for example due to country-specific content requirements.

The following list outlines some of the EDI processes of the various national subsidiaries. We will be happy to provide you with a complete catalog of all Markant national subsidiaries as well as the EDI message types and EDI communication channels on request.

A number of large companies began outsourcing the management of supplier-side business processes to Markant. This increased the need for Markant to adapt the previously global EDI specifications to the individual customers’ respective supplier bases in order to, for example, always ensure optimal support of the deployed heterogeneous ERP systems with relevant and valid data. This results in a large number of cross-connections and specifications, which can have custom properties depending on the end customer. This applies both to the EDI processes used, the mostly EDIFACT -based EDI formats, and to the respective process contents or EDI semantics.

The breadth of the range is illustrated by this exemplary list:

The Markant Group has been offering the AS2 protocol as an EDI communication channel for the exchange of all EDIFACT files for all suppliers for some time. Markant thus belongs to the continuously growing group of retail groups that are moving away from pure X.400-based EDI data exchange and offering suppliers a low-cost alternative to the fee-based VAN networks. In addition to advantages in terms of transaction security (voucher-based MDN receipts etc.), this offers suppliers an opportunity to significantly reduce the costs of using the X.400 network. As Markant acts as an EDI service provider for the exchange of selected EDI business processes for retail groups (see above), suppliers can save X.400 transaction costs and generate additional synergies across partners by switching to AS2 at Markant.

The Markant example illustrates that—despite striving for homogenization and standardization—many EDI requirements are still customer-specific and ultimately based on the individual semantic requirements of the ERP systems involved. Given this abundance of requirements, it becomes clear that a resource- and cost-saving integration of the listed processes is only made possible by the consistent encapsulation and reproducibility of the country- and partner-specific requirements. The use of synergies can only be successful if all required components are available on demand at any time, interchangeably and across scenarios, without requiring lengthy integration projects.

The Softzoll partner profile technology allows our customers to respond to the described scenarios quickly and without facing any escalating additional costs.