RVCF Business Process Guidelines for Digital Communications / EDI Group Update

By Paula Giovannetti, Supply Chain Best Practices Adviser, Retail Value Chain Federation

As announced in our last issue RVCF has formed a working group to create business guidelines for common digital communications and EDI transactions in use today. The mission of this group is twofold. The first is to provide guidelines for a specific retail business process relative to EDI and other digital workflow. This gives business operations the information needed to understand capabilities and communicate requirements to intra-company business partners, inter-company trading partners and solution providers. In the process we will identify best business practices. The second goal is to streamline and harmonize the language used, including standardizing terms, codes, definitions and actions expected for the data qualifiers used, whether in EDI or other forms of digital communications.

A group of 20+ Retailers, Merchandise Suppliers and Service Providers met for the first time on 8/4 and along with adopting the Group’s mission, we agreed that Error Notification, focusing on the 856 Ship Notice should be the first area of focus followed by Debit / Credit Notification, PO Change and Item Setup. 

Future work sessions will take place via video-conference on September 1st, October 6th and December 1st.  An in-person session will take place at the RVCF Fall 2022 conference where we hope to present our first guideline.  Registration for future calls is open to Retailers, Merchandise Suppliers and Service Providers regardless of RVCF Membership status.  There is no cost to participate, however, pre-registration is required.

Minutes from all group sessions along with reference documents and ultimately our completed guidelines will be housed in a private group within rvcf.com.  Those that register for the working sessions will automatically be assigned Group access.