A Proven Use Case of EDI at Malouf

Nate Obray, Director of Software Services, Malouf, United States Of America.

Nate Obray, Director of Software Services, Malouf, United States Of America.

I love solving business and technical problems. To me, the bigger, the better. That’s one of the main reasons I chose a career in software engineering and particularly at Malouf Companies. Malouf is a lifestyle and wellness company headquartered in northern Utah with more than 55 brands and businesses.

When I started at Malouf, I was the only software engineer on staff. Today, we have over 40 engineers and developers, specializing in everything from mobile and web development and integrations to warehouse, inventory, and business process systems.

One of my first experiences with electronic data interchange (EDI) was in the early days at Malouf. We had signed with a third-party company to provide EDI services, but I thought we could do this in-house. Somehow, I was able to convince Malouf to cancel our newly signed contract and let our engineering team take over.

Today, we utilize EDI in three main ways.

• To receive orders and send shipping information to customers
• To communicate inventory levels with our business partners (this has become especially important with supply chain constraints)
• To manage order invoices and payments

To maximize the benefits of EDI, my team put a huge emphasis on automation. We accomplished this by making sure our communication system was tightly integrated with company information.

For example, when we receive an 850 purchase order document, our system automatically processes the order and allocates inventory to one of our six locations based on inventory constraints and the optimal shipping location. It also automatically selects the shipping carrier, service level, and even packaging requirements for each shipment.

Our EDI system handles shipping exceptions and automatically adjusts documents sent to our partners to prevent future exceptions. This level of automation has allowed us to ship millions of packages with only marginal growth to our distribution team responsible for sending out orders.

To maximize the benefits of EDI, my team put a huge emphasis on automation.

After nine years at Malouf, my team is now adapting our software services to be offered to other businesses. Not only will we provide EDI services, but we’ll also offer customer relationship management (CRM), order fulfillment, point-of-sale data (POS), supply chain management, and warehouse management. We’re currently in the pilot stages and plan to roll out our services to many more companies in 2023.

Malouf excels with innovation, and our vertical integration strategy gives us a competitive advantage and more opportunities for growth. I’m excited to see what’s next for our team.