To drive supply chain advancements and efficiency between the company and its external business partners and customers, a leading provider of on-demand Business Community Management solutions, Inovis, announced that BlueLinx Corporation has selected Inovis’ comprehensive suite of Managed Services.

To route vendor traffic and supply chain documents, BlueLinx previously relied on two separate outsourced platforms. Due to system and operational redundancy and manual processes, this operational scenario created inefficiencies. Furthermore, the operational set-up made integration between both internal and shared external business processes and applications highly complicated.

The effort to consolidate Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) operations has been seen by the BlueLinx technology and business teams as an opportunity to utilize advanced business process integration with all customers across the supply chain. To consolidate BlueLinx’s vendor traffic onto a single value-added network (VAN) environment, the company turned to Inovis. The Inovis team completed the implementation within 90 days. BlueLinx decided, in addition, to further streamline its processes by outsourcing its EDI and supply chain communication to Inovis with the selection of Inovis Managed Services.

CEO of Inovis, Sean Feeney, declared: “BlueLinx is a company that understands that technology investments outside the enterprise can deliver significant, strategic value to their business and their customers.” He added: “With Inovis’ Managed Services, BlueLinx has consolidated its EDI operations to improve efficiency and service to its customers and vendors. By outsourcing the EDI operations with Inovis, BlueLinx can focus its resources on critical business activities.”

Inovis’ comprehensive suite of Managed Services solutions combines a dedicated project team, hosted technology, transaction and partner management, and service-level protection. The outsourced solution is supported by the Inovis Multienterprise Expert Services Hub (MESH) platform. The Inovis MESH platform is designed to be 100 percent available and the underlying Tier 4 data center is designed to operate at 99.995 percent availability with fully-tested disaster recovery capabilities.

A data translation project will be the second phase of the BlueLinx implementation. Inovis, after the implementation, will manage the conversion and matching of BlueLinx product identification numbers to the differing internal identification number formats of its key customers. This translation allows BlueLinx to further comply with the business process requirements of its customers. BlueLinx, in addition, will continue to reduce the burden on its IT department and gain additional efficiencies.