No matter what time of year, there’s always plenty to be grateful for—and when it comes to your business, one of those things is your EDI capability. All year round, but especially when holidays roll around, EDI makes the difference between smooth sailing and choppy seas for retailers and suppliers alike.
What is EDI capability?
Your EDI capability is your business’s ability to smoothly and easily exchange electronic business documents with your trading partners, saving you money, enabling you to work more efficiently, and empowering you to seize new opportunities for growth and profit.
EDI has been around for decades and remains a gold standard across many industries for document exchange, facilitating faster order processing, reduced errors and costs associated with manual data entry, improved supply chain visibility, and enhanced collaboration with trading partners.
Having robust EDI capabilities for your business, either through in-house expertise or the help of a cloud-based EDI managed service provider, is essential to keeping up with the rapid pace of the modern supply chain.
Let’s take a look at just ten of the many, many ways supply and retail EDI integration helps businesses all across America do their jobs better and easier—and reasons you have to be thankful for this wonderful electronic business document standard.
1. Make Big Shopping Days (Like Black Friday) a Lot Brighter
Your business’s EDI capability makes all the difference on busy holiday periods and major shopping days for suppliers and retailers. If you are a large supplier for a major retailer, data integration with EDI is absolutely essential for managing the torrential flow of goods and data that characterizes these holiday rushes.
With EDI cloud integration or an in-house EDI solution, you can thrive in these busy times and reap the benefits while non-EDI competitors get swamped. The more volume, the bigger the benefit.
EDI web service is especially useful for eCommerce businesses these times of the year, leveraging the Internet—the thing we do all our shopping on these days—to make EDI even more versatile and scalable.
2. No Frustrating Data Entry
Without EDI software integration or cloud integration, your business is stuck manually keying in your orders to your backend system, whether that’s a sophisticated ERP system or QuickBooks. And then, you must key in more data to your EDI system.
And if you don’t get EDI POs, like in the case of Direct Store Delivery vendors, you must key in your invoices “from scratch” into your EDI system. ERP and QuickBooks EDI integration eliminates all this pesky data entry—and who here is thankful for data entry, of all things?
Spare your employees the doldrums of data entry—that’s reason aplenty to be thankful for your business’s EDI integration capabilities.
3. Get Error Alerts When You Need Them
If any of you have ever paid hefty chargebacks, then you must be very thankful for error alerts. EDI integration allows you to take advantage of the many benefits your EDI software or your managed EDI provider offers.
What’s better than being notified immediately of an error or exception and rectifying it before it causes headaches later on? And you can thank your business’s EDI software integration for that!
4. No More Time-Consuming Human Errors
Integrating your EDI means fewer human hands stirring the pot and, therefore, less human error. Less human error means less time spent correcting those errors and more time spent doing the actual meaningful work for your organization that advances your mission and grows your business.
Whether holiday festivities or the weekend beckons, your workers don’t want to be racking up overtime stuck in the office researching EDI errors—and effective EDI capability means they don’t have to.
5. Better Business Relationships
Integrating your EDI with your ERP or order entry system is a vital step in forging stronger partnerships with your customers. An integrated EDI solution that runs smoothly and doesn’t create headaches for your trading partners will ensure that those EDI 850 purchase orders keep arriving, and that’s something to always be thankful for.
6. Drive Data Integration with EDI
All the ways your EDI capability enables data Integration make it possible to connect disparate data sources across your organization AND with the outside world. When you need Sally in Sales to get reports on five specific partners who send data in three different formats, EDI in sales makes it all possible. No problem!
To Sally in Sales, it might as well be magic, but we know better. Nevertheless, she’s grateful for your company’s EDI capabilities, too.
7. Move Faster with EDI Cloud Integration and Web Services
EDI web services have made data integration with EDI more flexible and near real-time when compared to traditional EDI. With everything moving to the cloud at warp speed, integrating via web services is becoming more and more common—unlocking a virtually unlimited landscape of integration possibilities. And with your EDI capabilities, that landscape is yours to explore!
8. EDI Integration: the Great Equalizer
EDI used to be a necessity for large, enterprise-level organizations exclusively, but now it’s caught on with just about everybody.
Today, we here at GraceBlood find ourselves implementing and supporting B2B integration and EDI capability for companies of all sizes—web stores, sales reps with handheld devices, and even local farmer’s markets. These businesses’ scalable and flexible integration plans are essential for their growth, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to help them along.
9. Smoother, Streamlined Online Shopping
Online sales have changed the way we shop. Can’t get something from a brick-and-mortar store in time for the holidays? An online shop can get you what you need, all from the convenience of your mobile device—and even with next-day delivery.
Another big trend that has become ubiquitous—thanks to EDI integration—is ordering online and collecting in person, otherwise known as BOPIS (buy online, pick-up in-store). Without EDI capability, access to real-time in-stock data, confirmation of shipping charges before you click Purchase, and same-day fulfillment and delivery would not be possible.
10. Putting Turkey (and Everything Else) on the Table
One of our favorite clients is Diestel Family Turkey Ranch. They produce the finest turkeys that money can buy, exercising a firm commitment to regenerative agriculture that made them become one of the first turkey producers to earn a Global Animal Partnership Step 5 rating. We’re honored to have clients like Diestel Family Turkey Ranch, who are so dedicated to sustainable and thoughtful farming practices.
And what brings those turkeys from their farm to your table in time for the holidays? That’s right—EDI integration. Another reason to be thankful for your business’s EDI capability and those of your supply chain partners.
All around the world, EDI is simplifying supply chains, saving time and effort, and giving businesses like yours increased capacity for growth and development. Whether you’re reaching out to new and old trading partners or customers, you’ve got plenty to thank your business’s EDI capabilities for.
And if your EDI capabilities aren’t working for you, then you might need a little help with EDI implementation—because at GraceBlood, we believe that EDI capability should always work for you, not vice versa. Reach out to us today and find out how our EDI cloud integration expertise can help your business grow.
Do you still have questions about the wide world of EDI? Find the answers in our free eBook: EDI Implementation Made Simple
