Sydney Tools case study

About Sydney Tools:

Sydney Tools is one of Australia's largest trade tool retailers, supplying professional

tradespeople and businesses through a growing national network of stores and suppliers.

The challenge:

As Sydney Tools continued to grow, so did the volume and complexity of supplier transactions. Managing purchase orders, invoices and other trading documents across a large supplier network required a scalable solution that could support both EDI-capable suppliers and those still relying on traditional document formats such as PDF.

That mix was the real challenge:

• Suppliers without EDI capability meant manual re-keying of invoice and order data, which was slow, error-prone and left the team with little real-time visibility into where documents sat in the process. 
• Reconciliation issues followed naturally and without one consistent way to manage trading partner communications, scaling further would have meant adding headcount rather than efficiency.

What Sydney Tools needed was a way to bring automation and consistency to supplier communications no matter how a supplier chose to send their documents.

The solution:

Sydney Tools implemented Pacific Commerce's Pacific Commerce Exchange (PCX) platform to centralise and automate the exchange of business documents with suppliers.

The platform supports the electronic exchange of key documents including purchase orders, invoices and other key transactions in whatever format (e.g. PDF, non-EDI formats etc.) they arrive in and converts them into structured data ready for processing.

By combining EDI and document digitalisation within a single platform, Sydney Tools was able to support a broader supplier community while increasing transaction automation across the business.

The result & benefits

The implementation provided Sydney Tools with a scalable platform for managing supplier transactions across its growing supplier network.

Benefits realised include:

• Increased automation of supplier document exchange.
• Reduced manual processing of supplier transactions.
• Improved data accuracy and consistency.
• Streamlined supplier on boarding.
• Greater visibility across document flows and transaction status.

• Support for suppliers with varying levels of technical capability.

Why Pacific Commerce?

Sydney Tools selected Pacific Commerce for its retail EDI expertise, supplier onboarding experience and ability to deliver both EDI and document digitalisation services through a single platform. 

As an Australian-owned and operated business, Pacific Commerce also provided the assurance of Australian-based support, ISO27001 certification and data that is hosted and processed exclusively within Australia.  

– Habib Assaf • Inventory Manager, Sydney Tools