The winds of change are blowing in Electronic Data/Document Interchange (EDI):

• The security and efficiency of the Internet has removed the necessity to outsource the transport of documents between trading partners


• The advent of XML technology and EZYB2B has also removed the requirement to outsource the document translation function


• Outsourcing EDI through third parties has for many Companies become an expensive anachronism


• The high cost of doing business is no longer accepted as a 'given' that can't be changed - there is continual pressure to reduce costs


• Increasingly, trading partners are wanting to move documents in a straight line i.e. use least-cost routing from one computer directly to another


• Good corporate governance is fuelling a requirement for Companies to gain full internal control over their commercial operations.

THE CHALLENGES

Some of the following will probably resonate with you:

• Being rushed into implementing EDI due to pressure from a dominant trading partner and possibly having to spend a lot more to set up than you really expected to


• Integrating with your back-end system can be a high-cost and lengthy exercise


• There is continual pressure to reduce the number of credit notes that arise from re-keying orders that are sent in by fax or email


• If you are a Supplier, some of your Customers are pressuring you to send electronic invoices but are slow to change to sending you electronic orders


• If you are a Customer, some of your Suppliers are pressuring you to send them electronic orders but are slow to change to sending you electronic invoices


• Motivating your "laggard" trading partners to embrace full electronic trading to reduce the cost of doing business for both of you.

THE FUTURE

There are several factors that no doubt are starting to concern you:

• More and more Customers and Suppliers are wanting to establish direct EDI connection and each has different document formats and integration challenges for you to contend with


• EDI is becoming more sophisticated. Trading partners are requiring greater responsiveness and document turnaround times are shrinking


• The volume of documents being transported is widely forecast to increase by 200 to 400% over the next few years


• You will be put under internal pressure to bring down the cost of doing business, and not allow it to continually go up i.e. achieve more with less resource.

The best long term solution is to take control and bring your EDI in-house to facilitate direct trading, but the ultimate benefits will only start to flow when you can motivate your trading partners to fully embrace EDI with you and start to gradually reduce the cost of doing business.

We have already been requested by a few Companies to help facilitate the wider EDI adoption process among their trading partners.

SALES FAQs

Using an "Applied EDI" approach, we have prepared a comprehensive list of questions and answers to provide you with an insight into general and specific EDI queries you might have, such as:

Q. Our ERP system is JDE Enterprise One which has a specific EDI Gateway input file format for Sales Orders and our customers have several different types of document formats they send us. How does EZYB2B deal with this?

Q. We have been asked by one of our larger trading partners to use AS2 as the document transport protocol. What facilities do you have available to do this, and how do we go about implementing it?

If you would like answers to these two questions, as well as a number of others, please go to the Downloads page and register to download the full document, which will, of course, increase in size as prospects and clients provide us with new and sometimes challenging questions to answer.