The fresh produce industry is rapidly embracing e-commerce technology as a means to streamline workflow and improve collaboration with trading partners. While early adopters have realized efficiency gains, data accuracy improvements and cost reductions, many companies are now finding that e-commerce technology has other benefits. E-commerce is now a prerequisite to doing business. Current implementations have focused on automating the full procurement cycle, including: price discovery, advertising and promotions, purchase orders, changes and confirmations, shipping notices, invoicing and payments.

Many view e-commerce as a foundational building block for future initiatives in collaborative planning, forecast and replenishment, product traceability, logistics and pallet/case identification through bar coding and radio frequency (RFID). All these technology initiatives require product and location synchronization with trading partners.

At Oppenheimer our main strategy is to adapt to how our customers prefer to conduct e-commerce within the framework of industry and technical standards. While this has resulted in a vast array of trading partner relationships, transaction sets and work flow choreography, it has also provided significant flexibility, business acceleration and increased capacity for growth.