Mattress Giant Implements Electronic Transaction Exchange With Top Vendors

Furniture World Magazine

Mattress Giant, one of the country's Top five bedding retailers, announced it has completed implementation of a major B2B initiative using the Transaction Management solution from FurnishNet, a leading provider of Internet-based supply chain solutions. As a result of this project, they are now able to process more than 95% of their manufacturer transactions electronically. Manufacturers now conducting electronic transaction exchange with Mattress Giant include: Simmons, Serta, Spring Air, King Koil, Kingsdown, Fashion Bed Group, and Leggett & Platt. According to Steve Williams, Senior Vice President and CIO for Mattress Giant, the decision to implement electronic document exchange was prompted by several problems associated with manual processes for printing and faxing purchase orders, and hand-keying acknowledgements and invoices: •High labor costs for overtime to meet suppliers' early order cut-off times •Lost time due to unreadable faxes, busy lines, missing faxes, fax hardware issues, etc. •Strained vendor relations due to unreliable PO acknowledgements and disputes over POs and invoices "With FurnishNet, we receive the benefits of fast and reliable purchasing and invoicing, inherent in a traditional EDI solution," said Williams. "However, we didn't have to build an IT infrastructure to maintain all the document mapping for each of our vendors, which saved a considerable amount of time and money for implementation." FurnishNet's solution for Transaction Management speeds the accurate transmission of purchase orders, purchase order acknowledgements, advance ship notices, invoices, and many other transaction types. By integrating e-mail, web applications, electronic data interchange (EDI), and XML, into a unique "Any-to-Any" exchange, FurnishNet is able to translate the information into the appropriate format for the immediate electronic flow of information between business partners of any size, running on any corporate system. Mattress Giant is headquartered in Addison, Texas (in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex), and operates over 250 stores in 14 states. About FurnishNet: Over 480 of the nation's leading retailers and manufacturers are using FurnishNet's electronic document exchange solution to streamline their supply chains. For more information, please call 1-800-854-2263, or visit www.furnishnet.com and take the Self-Guided Tour.