Cleo Integration Cloud for Wholesale + Distribution

Hey everyone, I'm Eric one of the solution architects here at Cleo.

I've had the good fortune of working in the B2B and data integration space for nearly 30 years, both as a solution architect helping organizations achieve their business and technical initiatives, but also as a customer myself.

I was part of a technical team working at a multi-billion dollar wholesale distribution organization.

It was our job our responsibility to be able to respond to our customers' integration initiatives, as well as being able to establish integrations with our downstream suppliers, which is very common in the wholesale industry.

Being able to satisfy the needs of both your, customers as well as your suppliers.

Today I'd like to spend some time talking about the Cleo Integration Cloud, specifically for the wholesale industry.

And we'll look at two key areas, the first of which is visibility:

How you as an individual within your organization, maybe as a technical professional, maybe as a business professional can have key insights into your integration activities.

Now, perhaps you are a procurement professional, and as someone in that role...

As you get signed into the Cleo Integration Cloud Cockpit, which is where you go to get your visibility... you can see at quick glance through the dashboard key metrics and analytics around the transactions and trends for the documents that are being exchanged and processed.

You can also see panels of information relative to the transactions you want to see.

Now, this environment is highly configurable, so perhaps you also want to be able to see invoice information... I can quickly add that into my viewing experience.

Now, maybe you are a finance professional... you too have access to the Cleo Integration Cloud Cockpit.

And you find that you don't need the order acknowledgment.

As you can see, you can tailor your viewing experience based on your role, based on your needs of what you want to view.

You can also dive into the transaction details themselves, so I can see inbound documents, outbound documents. I

I can search by partner.

I can search by document type.

I can also search by a document value, something like a purchase order number or an invoice number.

So, in the case of that procurement professional, maybe I'm looking into the status of an order.

I simply type in that purchase order number and the system presents back to me the transactions that contain that purchase order number value.

What I'm interested in is looking at the status of my outbound order and I can see in a very human-readable way some of the details around this transaction.

I know what the order was, who it went to, even some great summary level information like:

How many line items were on this order?

What was the total amount?

And, did we send it at what day or what time?

And, did we receive back the acknowledgement from our supplier letting us know that they did receive that transaction?

We can also tell by way of the detailed acknowledgment that they have responded with more information around the status of this order.

Now, maybe I'm a finance professional and in my situation, I'm looking for the status of an invoice again inside of the cockpit.

I can quickly and easily get to those details around that transaction.

Now for any of these transactions, I want to call your attention to the fact that we are capturing all of these details for all of the documents that you have established for your supplier community.

And in a wholesale procure-to-pay situation, generally that's things like outbound orders inbound acknowledgments, invoices, so on and so forth.

And as these transactions are taking place, you're sending orders you're receiving back:

Acknowledgments, invoices... We provide document correlation.

We weave together all of these transactions as part of the overall procure-to-pay message life cycle, so you have one single pane of glass to be able to go to see all of your transactions as they relate back in this situation to that original order.

You have complete visibility whether you're a technical professional or a business professional for your organization.

Now let's shift gears... up until now, we've been looking at some of the key visibility aspects you as the wholesale company can have into your transactions within the environment.

The second piece we want to look at is how you can leverage the Cleo Integration Cloud Studio to quickly onboard a new supplier trading partner.

Now, I know that as a wholesale organization, you're under a tremendous amount of pressure to respond to the needs of your customers.

But equally important, you want to be able to establish these digital electronic relations with your suppliers as well and oftentimes that takes a back seat because you're so busy working on your customer integrations.

The good news is with the studio you can quickly and easily get these new supplier relations set up.

So, we're looking at the Cleo Integration Cloud Studio.

It's your design user interface that allows you to be able to create, manage, and optimize your integrations.

On the left here, I have my project explorer which identifies various projects of mine.

I have a whirlpool supplier and inside of that, I have various objects these are the transactions with which we are exchanging with our suppliers orders, invoices, advanced ship notices.

Now, my task at hand is I need to be able to establish two new trading partner relations.

I can use this whirlpool object project as a template if I right-click and choose the CIC project generator.

The wizard will guide me through the process to onboard two new trading partners.

In this case, I'm going to leverage a template CSV file, and inside of it, I have two new trading partners, ABC company and XYZ company.

I click on the word finished and now I have two new trading partners ABC and XYZ that now contain the same business process workflow automation data mappings that I had established previously for whirlpool.

At no point do I have to start from scratch.. leverage the work that I've done.

When these two new projects are ready, I simply deploy them out to my cloud and I am well on my way to now having two new trading partners set up.

No longer do I have to wait weeks or months to have training partners established.

So, as we wrap, as a wholesale organization,, I know you are are under a tremendous amount of pressure to be able to respond to the needs of customers, as well as suppliers.

With the Cleo Integration Cloud, you can achieve your integration initiatives, have the visibility that you need to give you those actionable insights, and leverage your self-service Cleo Integration Cloud Studio to quickly onboard new trading partners.

Thanks for watching.

Have a great day