The rapidly expanding number of Manufacturers and Suppliers adopting OPAL all come with common business problems that they are trying to solve:

• They are drop shipping a large number of orders daily.
• EDI vendor cost and order processing labor is seriously impacting the profitability of these orders.
• Their order processing capacity is limited by their number of staff available.
• They need to add more staff to keep up.
• Someone needs to perform manual steps to process each order.  This often includes things like downloading orders from a retailer portal, loading them into their ERP, going to the portal again to send Acknowledgments, Ship Notices, Invoices and Inventory Updates, creating Packing Slips, using a 3rd party application for Shipping Labels, etc.  

Then there’s the profitability issue.  With an average cost of $7 – $11 including warehouse handling and order processing labor for a drop ship order it’s really difficult to squeeze out any profit at all on some items, and it certainly impacts the profitability of ALL items.  

They also really needed to be able to execute “perfect orders”.  Essentially, everything stopped when an order went wrong, forcing them to spend an enormous amount of time and effort researching and correcting the problem and, very often, incurring the expense of a call tag to retrieve the incorrect item and expedited shipping of the product that didn’t arrive when or where it was supposed to. Then, to top it all off, their Vendor Score Card suffered and they were a disappointment to the consumer. 

OPAL became their solution of choice for several reasons:  It enabled them to process a drop ship order in less than 8 seconds without an order processing intervention, to automatically receive orders from retailers, e-tailers, shopping carts and / or B2B partners, manage all of their EDI transactions, process and invoice orders through their ERP and accounting system, create packing slips and custom branded 3rd party shipping labels and get them to the warehouse for pick, pack and ship – 24 hours per day, seven days per week – even when there’s no one in the office.  

It even enabled them to do all of that WITHOUT ANY EDI DOCUMENT COST from a 3rd party EDI vendor.

Overall, it dramatically increased their profitability, increased the quality of their service, was configured to meet their internal business processes, eliminated the need for 3rd party shipping applications, was easy to implement and paid for itself VERY quickly. Does this sound worthwhile to you?

Every business must deliver product on time at the lowest possible cost and remain profitable.  However, to do that you need to manage a lot of moving parts from manufacturing, to warehousing, to order processing and shipping – not to mention all of the exceptions that occur and possible, subsequent charge backs.  Plus, you get to pay for all of the EDI documents needed.  At an average of $4.00 per order that’s incredibly expensive all by itself.  

All of these things combined really hurt your business’ profitability.

Many e-commerce businesses tackle this challenge by chaining multiple software systems together, like an E-Commerce Site, an ERP System, a 3rd Party Shipping System, and an EDI Translation / Transmission solution.  The only issue is that this still requires some degree of human intervention, the parts don’t always work well together and, consequently, they don’t provide the significant cost and error reduction that’s needed for optimum profitability.  

Now imagine if you could process a drop ship order in 8 seconds or less? By this, I mean can you receive orders from your customer retailers and e-tailers, manage all of their EDI transactions, process and invoice orders through your ERP and accounting system, create packing slips and custom branded 3rd party shipping labels and get them to the warehouse for pick, pack and ship – 24 hours per day, seven days per week – even when there’s no one in the office?

Oh, and what about EDI? How about handling all of that WITHOUT ANY EDI DOCUMENT COST from an EDI Service Provider?

IN LESS THAN 8 SECONDS, OPAL automates receiving orders from retailers and e-tailers, manages all EDI transactions, processes and invoices orders through your ERP and accounting system, and creates packing slips and custom branded 3rd party shipping labels per any retailer’s or e-tailer’s requirements.  Once shipped, it sends back tracking information and invoices to the retailer or e-tailer, as well as tracking packages and sending inventory updates.

Additionally, OPAL takes advantage of the direct EDI links provided by retailers and e-tailers enabling you to process an order with $0 cost for EDI documents.  OPAL downloads POs (Document 850) from retailers and e-tailers, sends back Acknowledgements (Document 997), ASNs (Document 856), Invoices (Document 810) and Product Inventory (Document 846) with no EDI charges and is 100% compliant with each retailer.

The first big part of successfully achieving profitability focuses on a dramatic reduction in order processing time, order processing cost and order errors.  The second big part is eliminating the cost of EDI in working with your trading partners. OPAL does just that for you.