Brown-Forman Selects Crossgate B2B 360 Services Powered by SAP® to Streamline EDI Projects and Comply with Global E-Invoicing Requirements
Brown-Forman, one of the top 10 largest spirits and wine companies in the world, has announced that the company will outsource B2B enablement to Crossgate, Inc.
Atlanta, Georgia on 5 March 2009
Crossgate Inc., the global expert in business-to-business integration (B2B), has been chosen by the largest American-owned spirits and wine company to address the company’s unique global EDI and E-Invoicing needs.
Brown Forman owns and markets some of the most well known liquor and wine brands in the world and sells its 35 brands in more than 135 countries across the globe.
Brown Forman had a steadily increasing backlog of EDI project requests, with each transaction requiring multiple weeks of internal effort, and increasing complexity associated with integrating trading partners in locations around the world. “Hiring new employees or training existing ones to include new global EDI requirements would have been cost-prohibitive for us because it would have been so resource-intensive,” said Kathy Pramik, Brown Forman’s AVP & Director of Enterprise Systems. “We want to keep our internal resources focused on value-added strategic business activities, so outsourcing our B2B enablement was the perfect solution.”
Ensuring regulatory compliance was another pressing concern for Brown-Forman. “Many countries we work with have created their own requirements for eBusiness processes, like Mexico’s Tax Authority E-Invoicing mandate,” explained Kathy Pramik, Brown Forman’s AVP & Director of Enterprise Systems. “Some of these regulations are very complex such as requirements for mandatory digital signatures and archiving. We can’t afford to overlook any details when we go to enable a new business partner, or everything grinds to a halt while we work out the compliance issues.”
Brown Forman selected Crossgate because they could provide professional B2B methodology and experience in addition to a well-developed repository of ready-to-run B2B mappings, a strong SAP relationship, and 24/7/365 first-level support. In the spring, Crossgate will complete replacement of Brown Forman’s existing business model with B2B 360 Services Powered by SAP, providing Brown Forman with a platform that enables rapid scalability to meet current and future business EDI enablement needs. The Crossgate solution will allow Brown Forman to leverage their resourcing model to scale easily to meet business timeline and/or project needs as the company continues to grow and expand their offerings around the world.
“Outsourcing our B2B enablement to a proven industry leader such as Crossgate will help us deliver EDI projects more efficiently and cost-effectively,” said Kathy Pramik, Brown Forman’s AVP & Director of Enterprise Systems. “Crossgate EDI and E-Invoicing Services are exactly the solution we need to support our global business requirements both now and in the future.”
About Crossgate, Inc.
Crossgate offers the world’s first Business-Ready Network, guaranteeing 100% integration of business partners, clients and suppliers. A single connection to the Network means electronic data exchange with any business partner regardless of their technical capability. In addition, Crossgate’s B2B-360° Services powered by SAP provide clients direct access to all integrated business partners in the B2B transaction network via their SAP systems. With its legally compliant e-Invoicing Services, Crossgate also provides an innovative and 100% secure solution to cover the entire process of incoming and outgoing invoices, including signatures, global compliance monitoring, and secure automated long-term archiving. More than 40,000 business partners, representing over 10 industries, currently exchange documents and data via the Business-Ready Network.
Crossgate is represented at four sites in Germany, with operations in Atlanta, London, Milan, Paris, and AsiaPac. For more information, visit http://www.crossgate.com
