Chocolatier Apromo Trading Finds a Sweet Spot with SapphireOne and SPS Commerce

Established in Sydney in 1988, Apromo Trading provides European ingredients and semi-finished products to premium Australian chocolate manufacturers and patisseries, and packaged chocolate and confectionery to high-end food retailers.

Apromo Trading EDI: Migrating to Full-Service EDI to Support a Growing Business

Australian chocolate and fine-food specialist Apromo Trading Pty Ltd imports two shipping containers and sundry plane shipments per week, and processes approximately 150 orders per day. After outgrowing a prior business system, Apromo wanted a solution that would scale with growth, and allow the company to focus on its core competencies rather than on managing day-to-day EDI tasks.

In addition to standard logistic, account and inventory management functionality, the future system would need to deliver real-time item-level visibility throughout the supply chain, adapt to the evolving Australian labelling regulatory framework, and deliver documentation required for compliance with food safety certification HACCP.

SapphireOne EDI Integration with SPS Was the Best-Fit Solution

To support its goals, Apromo Trading chose SapphireOne along with SPS Commerce Fulfillment (EDI). SPS Fulfillment is a full-service EDI solution that automates the exchange of orders, invoices, shipping documents and more – directly within SapphireOne.

Apromo Trading general manager Thierry Scherer said that the transformation was expected to produce a quantum leap in efficiency and growth without increasing variable costs. “Our goal is to automate as many processes and functions as possible, to free our team to focus on core strategic opportunities,” said Mr. Scherer.

“We’ve recently seen our average customer order volume increase, as well as the complexity of each order. We have approximately ten-times more line items on each order, drawing from an expanding number of products and fulfilment centres, going to a greater number of delivery addresses, with more sophisticated delivery instructions – all required faster than ever to meet the ‘just in time’ fulfilment model,” said Mr. Scherer. “And we have further expansion firmly on the radar. Without automating these transactional functions, we would need to add more reactive people to handle the work. We chose instead to adopt modern supply chain automation to effectively eliminate duplication errors, with SapphireOne and SPS Commerce. Now instead of adding data entry staff, we’re retasking the existing team almost exclusively to proactive business growth efforts.”

Apromo Trading EDI and ERP Transformation Delivers Gains

Because SPS Commerce operates a retail network rather than replicating potentially hundreds of point-to-point retailer-supplier connections, the company can proactively maintain retailer connections on behalf of clients in a fraction of the time required by conventional systems.

Mr. Scherer said that the transformation delivered considerable gains, with time efficiency, accuracy, and visibility improvements since business system migration. Apromo Trading approached the system migration through a strong testing regime with the two technologies.

“SapphireOne and SPS Commerce were on standby and highly responsive to our service calls. Nobody expects a major system migration to proceed without issues – the important thing is they be resolved quickly and transparently. SapphireOne and SPS Commerce did just that, working together seamlessly to ensure Apromo Trading moved to production on schedule,” said Mr. Scherer. This validated Apromo’s strategic decision to work with business solution providers that operate and support from within the same time zone.

“We’ve heard too many horror stories of companies entirely breaking down trying to work with systems based in America or Europe,” said Mr. Scherer. “SapphireOne with SPS Commerce delivers us the functionality and scalability we need, with real-time help from local experts when we need it. Anything less was a deal-breaker for us.”