Beyond Traditional EDI – Smart Companies Leveraging EDI Capabilities to Streamline Their Businesses

~ trgedi

We’re currently involved in 3 projects leveraging EDI capabilities to streamline processes that are not typically handled via EDI:

  • One of our clients is actively using EDI to process inter-company orders. They have multiple companies, some running different versions of the same ERP. They already use EDI with their customers and they had the foresight to engage us to set up EDI to handle orders between their companies.
    • How it works: The companies placing orders have outbound EDI PO’s generated automatically on a set schedule when PO’s are printed for plants that receive intercompany orders. The EDI files are dropped across their network into the same folder where incoming EDI customer orders are placed. For the companies receiving the orders, they flow in just like any other external customer EDI orders through the same processes – customer service reps are already trained on these processes.
  • We are in early stages of scope design with another client on leveraging EDI to process their inter-company orders. One of the companies uses a different ERP than the others, but EDI will present their data in a format they can use to import/create orders.
  • Another client, who is currently using EDI with their customers, engaged us to develop a web-based ordering system for their numerous dealers around the world. To get the web orders into their ERP customer order system, we leveraged their existing EDI infrastructure so that web orders will flow through the same process as their incoming EDI, simplifying and streamlining the process – also, their customer service reps are already trained for processing EDI so it fits into their existing processes.

These are excellent examples of companies leveraging their investment in EDI to streamline and improve other business processes.

Once you have the EDI foundation in-place, it makes a lot of sense to leverage it as much as possible by adding external EDI customers, and using that foundation to help your business streamline other processes where orders need to be created in your system.

 

 

Advertisement