Is it possible to manage your business effectively if you don’t have complete visibility into your transactions? It’s not. Every day, your company carries out thousands of transactions with partners, suppliers, and customers. The technology and communication channel that manages these transactions are critical because even if one small thing goes wrong somewhere, it would create a ripple effect of problems for different people in different departments.
In this day and age of digitization, you’d think that businesses and supply chains across the world would have moved or are planning to make a move to digital. And yet, Gartner has reported that more than 50% of organizations still don’t have a plan for supply chain digital transformation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made it abundantly clear to businesses that digitization is the only way forward. An Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solution is the right place to start optimizing supply chains.
One of the main challenges that supply chain management is facing now is the lack of end-to-end visibility on inventory, orders, and consignments. Apart from that, important information locked away in silos makes it more challenging for teams to coordinate and synchronize information. With every missed step, the bullwhip effect amplifies, resulting in highly incorrect demand forecasts and incompetent order fulfillment. Ensuring information accuracy is key to eliminating delays in communication and in turn, ensuring proper supply chain coordination.
How do companies feel about EDI?
Here are some statistics to consider.
The EDI market is expected to reach $5.9 billion by 2025 but is aging fast, leading to a shortage in IT skills.
Around 80-90% of B2B traffic is conducted through EDI, and this number is growing 3-5% annually.
While 70% of all orders are automated using EDI/XML, portals, and/or Exchanges, EDI is the most popular method of choice for most business.
Most EDI users are quite satisfied with how it improves supply chain performance. Wondering why? It’s because EDI makes it easier for businesses to communicate and collaborate. Companies can use EDI to share business information reliably. From sending orders and notifying about incoming deliveries to confirming deliveries and reserving transport and sending an invoice, EDI helps them make business transactions easier in real-time. What’s more? All of this happens without any human interaction and doesn’t require calling, sending emails, or messages. EDI saves time and effort significantly and ramps up the business cycle. With automated processes, the time needed to process the data manually is reduced and so are the number of errors that occur when data is entered, recorded, and compared manually.
Integrated EDI is the next step forward
If by now you’re thinking what can be better than standalone EDI for your business? It’s integrated EDI. By integrating EDI with your ERP software, you can further streamline operations. When you have independent solutions for specific processes, you will eventually end up with several disconnected applications which may not be compatible with each other. Though a few businesses like to work with standalone EDI applications, an integrated EDI can help you get the most out of your solution. With EDI integration, you can automate and streamline data flow from one end to the other end of the supply chain process.
What does Integrated EDI bring to the table?
Integrated EDI brings many gifts for your business.
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Comprehensive visibility
Information is everything in the supply chain industry. Your success or failure depends largely on your ability to promptly understand, evaluate, and act on information you have. The right information at the right time helps you enhance operations and gain a competitive edge over others. With integrated EDI and AI-powered insights and analytics, you can simplify management and monitoring of information, fine-tune operations and supply chain performance with deep insights, and gain actionable insights into the information flowing between systems, vendors, and partners.
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Shorter order cycles and streamlined processes
Integrated EDI can simplify your procurement process to a great extent. Retailers can use integrated EDI to send suppliers an electronic purchase order and the supplier can reply with a confirmation record within minutes. The changes in the purchase orders can also be handled right away. The right EDI solution will bring many benefits to your business, like
Creating quick procure-to-pay cycles
Providing better inventory control
Decreasing labor costs
Creating accurate purchase order delivery
Fast-tracking payments
Enhancing order fulfillment rates
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Improved accuracy and productivity
Inaccurate data often leads to incorrect prices, duplicate orders, or out-of-stock situations. With integrated EDI, you can always stay ahead of inaccurate data. It automates critical operations across inventory management, purchase order processing, distribution management, and production management. With automation, manual interference reduces significantly, which translates to fewer errors and more productivity.
What’s the next step?
In a business world that’s going digital by the minute, integrated EDI is exactly the competitive advantage you need. It can manage vital aspects of your supply chain cycle effectively with minimal manual effort.
If you’re still second-guessing your investment in integrated EDI, rest assured that its long-term benefits will always trump the up-front costs. Staying ahead of your competition means it’s time for you to reevaluate your business goals and set your EDI integration goals.
And if you are looking for an end-to-end integrated EDI solution partner who can help you get started, Monitor Pro is here to help. Our specialized integration services provide you access to essential AI-powered tools that can help you efficiently manage your order cycles and provide extensive visibility into your supply chain processes.
Book a demo now to find out more about Monitor Pro and get answers to your integration queries.
