One of the most common questions posed to us is: Why can’t we get EDI POS data for a certain retailer? Allow me to break that question down, as it is multi-faceted.

With regard to this issue’s topic, “Clouds and External Applications”, we can speak to some personal experiences and offer some food for thought. As far as our own experience, we offer both in house and cloud based software solutions. We see trade offs to each.

Since we primarily focus on Retail and Sales Analysis and Demand Planning, the primary EDI data we work with is the 852 Point of Sale document. We sometimes require store lists, inventory and ASN documents as well. These are then run through our software to cleanse, amend, adapt and add to our database.