Online Inventory Position File Policy

Version 1.1 April 9, 2015

Indigo is focused on improving the experience of our Online customers. This communicates Indigo’s expectations regarding vendor provided inventory position files and the fulfillment of purchase orders placed by Indigo to support Online customer orders.

As background, when a vendor provides Indigo an inventory position file with an ISBN and quantity this triggers the ISBN to appear on Indigo’s website as available to order. The only exception to this is if an ISBN has not yet been published; in this situation, Indigo will still present the ISBN as Not Yet Published, but available for Pre-Orders to be placed by customers.

When Indigo sends a vendor a purchase order for SAN # 7603223, the sole purpose of this purchase order is to fulfill an Online Customer order that Indigo has accepted. Indigo’s expectation is that Online Cascade Purchase orders will be 100% filled by the delivery date (or earlier) in the purchase order. The only acceptable exception to this that Indigo will accept is for Not Yet Published titles. In this situation, vendors are required to send in the ACK29 segment of the EDI POA document the code BA – Backordered: Not Yet Printed.

Effective June 1, 2015 there will be a $25 cost recovery charge applied for each unit that is not fulfilled (other than those skus where BA has been provided in the POA document as noted above) The guiding principle is that if a SKU is presented within your position file which then leads to Indigo accepting an Online customer order, this SKU must be shipped no later than the confirmed PO Delivery Date to Indigo’s Online DC to fulfil the related PO.

The following should guide vendors as to what should be included and/or excluded from the position file:

• Include SKUs that you have in stock in a warehouse within North America. If you do not have access to the inventory from a North American location, it will take too long for this order to be fulfilled and meet our Online customer promise.
• Include SKUs that are Non-Returnable Titles; if Indigo orders this SKU on behalf of our customer, we expect vendors to fulfill that purchase order.
• Include SKUs that are Short Discounted Titles; if Indigo orders this SKU on behalf of our customer, we expect vendors to fulfill that purchase order.
• Include SKUs that are Print on Demand Titles that will be printed in North America; if your current practise has been to not place a value in your position file for these skus, our recommendation is to insert a value of 100 units. If the value provided by vendors is zero, these products will not display as available on our website. If Indigo orders this SKU on behalf of our customer, we expect vendors to fulfill that purchase order.
• Include SKUs that are Not Yet Published; if Indigo orders this SKU on behalf of our customer we will accept a POA Acknowledgement code of BA. Vendors must delivery this purchase order a minimum of 4 days before the Publication Date to allow Indigo to ship the ISBN to Online customers no later than the Publication Date.
• Exclude SKUs that cannot be sold and/or distributed in Canada by your company through Indigo.

A process change that could help vendors improve the accuracy of your position file is to increase the frequency of these files being sent to Indigo. To explore this opportunity, please contact masterdata@indigo.ca.

There is a practise among some of our vendors to mask the actual level of inventory held in stock by using a dummy value such as “99999”. Indigo is working towards implementing an Available to Promise (ATP) process for our Online business. This process will help to further improve our Online customer experience by allowing Indigo to monitor available stock at our vendors and ensure we do not oversell a particular SKU. We require our vendors to stop using the practise of a dummy value and replace this with an accurate inventory level as of June 1, 2015.