Successful EDI Implementations

It is important to adapt a new company philosophy to embrace EDI.  Understand the company benefits from doing EDI.  Review time lines and event schedules for your open but tightly integrated solution.  Discuss benchmarks used to measure implementation integrity and EDI success.

What is EDI:

EDI is the process of using computers to exchange business documents between companies.  Electronic commerce is a means to extend business processes to include:  suppliers, vendors, financial institutions in a fully integrated supply chain.

What are the Corporate Challenges for Companies to implement EDI:

• Allocation of internal resources.
• Departments are afraid EDI implementation will come out of ‘their’ budget.
• Fear of not receiving return on investment “ROI”.
• EDI is a very intrusive process that affects all departments of company.
• Look past initial upfront costs.
• Challenge of learning new software.
• Potential re-org of departments.

What are the Corporate Benefits for Companies to implement EDI:

• Selling tool for obtaining new larger accounts that require EDI.
• Puts your products on customer’s floor in a more efficient manner.
• Enables quicker payment following transfer of goods.
• Allows CSR’s to service the customer and stop manually keying in orders.

Successful and Fast Growing Companies Use a Very Common EDI Philosophy:

Focused E-Commerce worked with the second fastest growing company in the US and a common theme between Focused E-Commerce and the client was to ‘Service the Customer, or Someone Else Will’.  What that means is, try to make it as easy as possible for your customers to order your product,  receive your product and pay for your product, and that means using EDI.  Enable your customer to receive invoices electronically and in the format your customer desires.  Advance Ship Notices will alert the receiving department that a shipment is coming and tell them what the contents are for every carton or pallet.  When your customer can use EDI and reduce their labor costs and increase revenue that will make the business relationship beneficial to all parties.

Find a Great EDI Partner:

• Focused E-Commerce has been doing EDI for over 12 years.
• Leverage our experience.
• Expect to receive a 65% reduction in upfront costs because much of the work has been completed.
• 100% budget predictability.
• 100% return on investment ‘ROI’ in less than 12 months.
• Use our mapping library that integrate with all of the major ERP applications.

What are Your Companies EDI’s Goals:

It is important to understand your 1, 3 and 5 year goals for electronic commerce and B2B integration ‘EDI’.  How can EDI help your company grow?  How will EDI increase revenue and decrease labor costs for you and your trading partners.

What are EDI Implementation Benchmarks:

• Successful EDI implementation results in the following:
• Increase in sales via EDI
• Empower end users to service customers
• Increase in electronically submitted invoices, and receive payments quicker
• Efficient product delivery to customers
• Reduction in labor costs and receive more added value from internal CSR staff
• Increase growth
• Decrease in errors resulting from manually entered orders
• Zero dollars in Charge backs

Check out my next blog article entitled ‘AVOIDING THE PITFALLS IN THE EDI IMPLEMENTATION USING THESE BEST PRACTICES FOR INBOUND PURCHASE ORDER AND OUTBOUND INVOICE‘.  This blog will address the inbound purchase order, outbound invoice, outbound advance ship notice and outbound purchase order acknowledgment.  This will address specific issues with the above transaction sets.