How Trinidad Gains EDI Control and Improved Customer Responsiveness

BUSINESS NEED

Denver-based Trinidad Benham Corp. is a merchandising, packaging, trading, and distribution company that does private-label packaging of dry beans, rice, popcorn, gourmet soup mixes, and food contact products, including aluminum foil, plastic wrap, parchment papers, and wax papers. The company uses food service distributors to deliver these items and other commissary products to restaurants and retail outlets across the U.S. Additionally, the company has packaging plants in California, Colorado, Idaho, Tennessee, and Texas, a foil packaging plant in Georgia, and processing plants in California, Colorado, Nebraska, and Idaho. 

With its growing EDI processes managed by a VAN and associated costs escalating (while support declined), Trinidad Benham sought a single-platform MFT and data transformation solution that could integrate with its own applications and complex supply chain, expedite partner onboarding, and deliver more control over its critical EDI workflows.  

IT Challenge

Trinidad Benham exchanges purchase orders, invoices, acknowledgments, and shipping notices with its CPG customers and receives ship status updates from its shipping vendors. The company had been working with a software consulting firm to build applications that handle and transform these EDI documents, but with 40,000 documents exchanged a year, Trinidad Benham looked to better control its EDI integration so it could onboard new customers faster. Efficiently bringing EDI processing in-house meant the largest provider of beans, rice, and popcorn in the U.S. could regain that control and greatly reduce costs by cutting ties with its VAN. 

“The control aspect is big to us, as we need to make changes quickly to adjust to our customer needs, said Tim Hagan, director of information technology for Trinidad Benham. “Cleo allowed us to do just that and without the hassle of creating a custom solution. Now, we can bring new customers on our EDI platform quickly by using Cleo.”  

The Solution

Its consulting company did some research and recommended Cleo Integration Cloud for its functionality and price point. From there, Trinidad Benham upgraded to Cleo Integration Cloud and hasn’t looked back. Trinidad Benham now uses the Cleo Integration Cloud as its AS2 platform to connect to trading partners and exchange EDI documents, and Cleo's tool for more efficient data transformation and mapping. “Cleo Integration Cloud has been a powerful tool for us as we use it to transform incoming EDI documents to our current format, which has saved us many hours of reprogramming our internal systems,” Hagan said. “We are able pass along the incredible time savings in the form of improved customer service.”