Seres: Could you introduce EDF’s commercial division in a few words?
EDF - EDF’s commercial division, which has 700 staff, is the area that deals with sales and marketing of EDF products and services to customers. We work in particular on customer relationship management with companies and local authorities. Following the recent opening up of the energy market, EDF’s market share is now more than 80% and we handle between 2 and 3 million transmission points.

Seres: EDF was one of the EDI trailblazers in France outside of the major retail chains and the car industry. Why was that?
EDF – We started using EDI in 1995 for internal purposes. We used to receive invoicing data from various EDF branch offices across the country. Our aim was to have an overview of invoicing volumes for all of our customers. Then, in the late 90s, we started to get requests from our main customers who also wanted to receive invoice data via EDI for their automated accounting processes. Which was achieved for the first customer in 2001 with the Allegro network and the sending of EDI invoices (simple electronic invoices with paper duplicate).

Seres: What day-to-day use do you make of Allegro and what benefits do you gain from it?
EDF - Within EDF’s commercial division, we use EDI via Allegro solely to meet our customers’ expectations. For our main customers who receive a substantial volume of invoices, enabling them to implement automated invoice processing and eliminate manual input is a genuine service that we can offer, in addition to those services related to our energy supplier business.
The implementation of Allegro for issuing electronic invoices is therefore a means for us to improve customer satisfaction and retention with EDF’s services. Consequently, the benefits of using Allegro are mainly customer-focused.

Seres: How would you sum up all these years of working with Seres and using Allegro?
How do you see the future? EDF – We can say that the services Seres provides are really of good quality. Over all these years, we have in fact noticed that Seres is genuinely concerned with the quality of the services that it offers to its customers.

Seres: How would you sum up all these years of working with Seres and using Allegro? How do you see the future?
EDF – We can say that the services Seres provides are really of good quality. Over all these years, we have in fact noticed that Seres is genuinely concerned with the quality of the services that it offers to its customers. We will soon be experiencing a real technological turning point with Allegro because next year we are moving on to XML technology and the volume of our data traffic will therefore rise significantly. We will soon be experiencing a real technological turning point with Allegro because next year we are moving on to XML technology and the volume of our data traffic will therefore rise significantly.

Seres: Who is EGD?
B. Hourtané: EGD is EDF and Gaz de France’s joint-venture operator for the distribution of electricity and gas to end-customers in France. We are organised into 98 centres across the country.
In figures, that makes 27 million electricity customers on 1,120,000 km of network, and 10.5 million gas customers on 170,000 km of network.

Seres: What does EGD’s dematerialization project consist of?
B. Hourtané: The Serval project is first and foremost a logistics traceability project, to improve the efficiency of the company’s processes, and the supply chain in particular. EGD was in fact confronted with the following issue: that of all the equipment distributed by the supply organisation, only half transits through our own warehouses, the other half of the equipment is sent directly to the end customers. The sending and receiving of dematerialized documentation therefore emerged as a good way to track equipment. In addition, suppliers were asking for a dematerialized ordering process. They realised that to obtain the best productivity levels and the best quality of procurement, the circulation of information had to be reliable from ordering onwards.

Seres: What are the project’s objectives?
B. Hourtané: As I was saying previously, this project meets the need for data flows to be reliable and optimised, and consequently it will also result in a reduction in administration costs. It will give us improved management over the risks related to equipment traceability, and a reduction in stocks and in scrap owing to use-by dates.

Seres: Why was Seres chosen as the service provider? What are the benefits of Seres’ solution compared with other solutions on the market?
B. Hourtané: Seres offers the most beneficial solution for EGD when all of our requirements are taken into account. The multi-format platform on offer is adaptable to all the situations we encounter with our suppliers.
In addition, Seres has the capacity and skills to guide and support suppliers within a partnership approach. Seres’ European coverage was also a significant factor in our decision, since a good number of our suppliers are located outside France. It was also important that the chosen solution covers all the necessary functionality and all message types sent and received, i.e. purchase orders, dispatch notes and invoices.

Tax-compliant electronic invoices were the icing on the cake! The solution presented by Seres was a perfect match for the requirements we described in the specification.

Seres – Could you introduce SFR to us?
P. Lheritier - SFR is a company that sells mobile and landline telephone services, and is now an ISP since recently taking over Neuf Cegetel. Our customers include the general public, businesses, companies and operators supported by 10,000 employees.

We are currently the second-largest French telecommunications operator in terms of revenue with 20 million mobile customers, 3.4 million landline customers, and 3.8 million Internet customers.

Seres – You implemented EDI with your customers using our outsourced e-Presto solution. Why was this decision taken?
P. Lheritier - In our business, our customers include most of the major retailers, which sell our products to end customers. These retailers all use Seres’ Allegro value-added network. We ourselves were not connected to any value-added network, and we wished to implement EDI with a minimal impact internally. For this reason, we chose an EDI solution run as an outsourced service, namely Seres’ e-Presto solution.

Seres – How was implementation of your project organised?
P. Lheritier – In 2003, we firstly implemented electronic data interchange with Casino, mainly as regards orders. Then more recently, we also implemented the same message type with five other brands, i.e. Auchan, Cora, la FNAC, Metro, and Econocom. To ensure a minimal impact internally, we asked Seres to adapt to our file format, namely SAP. Implementation was quick and easy. We received the business requirement from our SFR production and logistics division, produced a schedule, and then ran tests and validation for each message type.

Seres - You have just implemented a new electronic data flow with e-Presto. Could you tell us about this new step?
P. Lheritier – It is a logical progression in our process of switching to dematerialization documentation. We already receive orders from our customers using EDI, the objective was therefore to put the next stage in place – EDI invoicing (simple electronic invoicing). In addition, this was a regularly-requested requirement from our retail customers.

Seres - Why did you ultimately opt for the Seres solution?
P. Lheritier – With the outsourced e-Presto solution, we were able to send and receive messages directly in our SAP format. Which means very little implementation to be done in-house. It was therefore the easiest and least expensive solution for us to implement. As regards quality of service, there is nothing to be said. When we encounter problems, they don't come from Seres! The new phase of the project ran very well. So far, we have been completely satisfied while working with Seres, both on a day-to-day basis, and on the project aspect.