Basin Electric Power Cooperative, headquartered in Bismarck, North Dakota, has been a MotherLode North America “hub” customer since 2004. Basin Electric (http://basinelectric.com) is a consumer-owned, regional generation and transmission (G&T) cooperative providing wholesale power to member rural electric systems in nine states.
Value proposition for a MotherLode “hub” customer
- The e-purchasing system frees up purchasing agents from routine order management and allows them to focus on managing vendor relationships and other value-added transactions.
- The system reduces processing costs from $25 per non-cataloged item and $12 per cataloged item to $1 per line item.
- Improved turnaround time allows us to reduce our min/max inventory levels.
- We’ve experienced reduced shipping errors because the supplier doesn’t have to re-key orders into their system, saves time in our warehouse and gets correct materials to our end users faster.
- Promised delivery dates from the supplier are electronically received in our system, improving the planning/scheduling process for the work.
- Increased procurement efficiency has allowed us to support new projects and major capital installations with no increased staffing levels.
- The EDI PO Acknowledgment enables purchasing team to truly manage supplier alliance (cost-plus) agreements effectively. Prior to this our process was far more cumbersome.
- The addition of EDI invoices has reduced manual paper handling in financial services department.
MotherLode “spoke” customer testimonials
- We experienced increased order volume and significantly faster receipt of major orders due to electronic connectivity with our customers.
- The Web Forms solution provides us an electronic archive of all business transactions during a one-year interval. This helps when disputes, inconsistencies or the desire to review order trends arise.
- The Web Forms solution provides us with real time status of orders and invoices. The likelihood of an invoice getting lost has greatly diminished.
- We have used the same MotherLode solution to connect with multiple customers without the need to learn new user interfaces and with the ability to aggregate all transactions within their monthly service fee structure.