EDI Benefits

Replacing your paper documents with electronic documents has several obvious benefits. Lets take a purchase order for example; replacing a paper based purchase order with an electronically exchanged one will immediately impact the way you order your supplies. No longer will the request to purchase products from your suppliers take days but it will be almost instantaneous. This is a very different way of doing business.

Changing the way your company does business is not something that can be taking lightly. You may ask the question - 'why upset the business processes that are working well for me today'? In today's global economy, every business faces pressures to improve its product or service, while at the same time tightly controlling or reducing costs. Many have relied on their IT people to assist in automating and streamlining their processes internally and while this has helped somewhat, exchanging business data between customers and suppliers lags behind.

The need for quick turnaround and accurate data transfer is more critical than ever. Lets review a couple of the key benefits of electronic data interchange or EDI.

Liberate valuable resources: Focus your resources on other high priority work, instead of tediously entering in manual data to your accounting package. Invest in tools that automatically schedule and process without human intervention.

Eliminate manual and duplicate entry: Bi-directional integration between EDI documents and popular accounting packages such as:

• Sage MAS 90, 200, 500, Business One, Timerline, Pro, Peachtree, Simply Accounting and more;
• Microsoft Dynamics GP, SI, NAV, AX, Small Business Manager and more;
• Epicor Enterprise, Epicor Vantage, Epicor iScala, and more.
• Integration with over 35 financial software systems - find your accounting package here.

Dramatically improve speed:

• reduced business cycle times gives your company a healthy competitive advantage;
• once you receive data it is immediately ready for use with other internal applications such as your customer management system (CRM), or financial package;
• sending an electronic document across the country or around the world takes seconds or minutes not days when compared to the postal system.

Drastically improve accuracy: Each time data is manually entered into a system, there is the chance of errors being introduced. With EDI accuracy is improved in several ways:

• all data moved electronically more than likely has passed through a validation layer; thus your data is clean resulting in a decrease in costly chargebacks;
• regardless of how many additional parties may be adding information to the document the data accuracy remains in tact.

Improve operational efficiency: In addition to these benefits your business can be impacted in other ways:

• increase trading partner relationships with improved efficiencies in supply chain management. By agreeing on how EDI documents will be sent and received with your trading partner you strengthen the customer satisfaction of customers dealing with you;
• Greatly improve planning and processing. Processing documents electronically allows suppliers to process orders quicker and schedule shipments accordingly allowing the manufacturer to anticipate and schedule tasks in advance.