For many companies, implementing EDI and onboarding trading partners is a time-consuming, costly, and frustrating process. Traditional EDI software integrations and partner onboarding have not evolved over the years. If you’ve accumulated EDI connections with hundreds of trading partners, the thought of switching platforms may seem daunting. A growing number of companies are learning that there are new solutions with modern architectures available that make EDI much simpler to manage, maintain and scale. They warrant a closer look.
Orderful is one of these new solutions. Built as a cloud EDI platform that eliminates the most common problems and hassles associated with building and maintaining EDI connections, here are five ways Orderful has simplified the day-to-day management of EDI.
1. It starts with offering a modern API.
Until now, if you wanted to connect your business systems to EDI software, you were looking at writing a custom interface, often in the programming language of the business system. The custom interface would often need to be modified to accommodate each new trading partner’s specific EDI requirements. Resulting in maintaining a lot of custom code in multiple languages.
With the Orderful cloud EDI platform, your developers code to simple RESTful APIs to integrate your enterprise applications to Orderful. You can also utilize any iPaaS, middleware, or any programming language to connect your business system to Orderful’s API. This may not sound like such a big deal. But for EDI software, this is quite unique and long overdue. Your team does not need to know X12 or EDIFACT as the Orderful platform leverages JSON. Orderful validates and converts your JSON data into the formats that each of your trading partners require.
This means any developer can service EDI. Given how hard it is to find experienced EDI developers, this can save extensive time and reduce a lot of costs for your business.
2. Integrate once and simplify integration by consolidating trading partner requirements.
Gathering and managing EDI transactions specifications from dozens of trading partners can be painful. For example, some partners require 3 documents, other partners require 5 documents, and you have to manage all the nuances of what one partner expects in an 850 versus another.
Orderful will digitize all of these requirements for you. It will also allow you to build one integration with the API per transaction type (i.e. 850). You send a single payload for that transaction and Orderful will do the mapping and validation to each trading partner’s unique requirements.
Orderful provides an integration assistance that allows your team to visually see the data you sent and the mapping to the proper EDI requirements. You can then make any final changes using the point and click business rules engine (i.e. always send Box instead of BX) to handle the minor requirements without requiring a developer to make code changes.
3. More than 2,500 pre-integrated EDI network trading partners.
Orderful has built a network of 2,500 pre-integrated trading partners. This enables you to dramatically reduce your time spent on EDI. Orderful does the heavy lifting by keeping up with the trading partner’s ever-changing requirements, freeing your team for more important tasks. Once connected to Orderful’s platform, you can start testing and trading within a week or less.
Furthermore, Orderful publishes digital EDI guidelines for each trading partner in the network, and uses these EDI requirements to do real-time automated EDI data validation. This validation removes the traditional feedback loop problems of EDI. Orderful also provides pre-configured connections for each trading partner in the network using major channels such as AS2, HTTP/S, SFTP/FTP, Poller, and VAN.
4. Reduce costs by eliminating EDI chargebacks and integration errors.
EDI chargebacks are financial penalties imposed by trading partners for EDI transactions that don’t comply with a trading partner’s requirements. These chargebacks can add up quickly and cut into your already thin margins with your trading partners. Orderful streamlines your testing and validation processes so you can make sure a new EDI transaction is going to be accepted by the new trading partner. Testing scenarios are published for each trading partner in the network and include requirements that will guide you through the testing process with each partner.
But perhaps the biggest time-saver Orderful offers for the testing process is the rules capability. Rather than hiring pricey EDI consultants, or waiting for an EDI developer to become available, your business analysts can write EDI rules using the point and click interface, and can easily modify transactions without needing a developer to modify code.
5. Onboard new EDI trading partners 80% faster.
No one wants EDI onboarding to be difficult. However, there are challenges of collecting requirements, coding new interfaces, and prioritizing other tasksall with limited resources. Unfortunately, this has led to the industry standard for new EDI onboarding of 6-8 weeks.
Orderful customers are onboarding new trading partners in days, not months. How is this possible?
- A modern integration approach leveraging APIs vs. traditional EDI map building.
- Consolidation of your trading partner requirements into one common payload per transaction type.
- A pre-connected EDI network of 2,500 trading partner requirements and connections.
- Real-time validation that removes the traditional feedback loops and ensures data quality.
- The ability to write data transformation rules to solve problems in real-time without writing code. The combination of these capabilities leads to faster onboarding. For many companies, onboarding is 80% faster.
Examples of EDI success stories
Using the Orderful cloud EDI platform, companies have:
- Onboarded trading partners in as little as one day
- Accelerated time to market with new EDI partners by 80%
- Reduced transaction and consulting costs by 31%
- Seen 100% EDI compliance with no chargebacks
- Reduced the need for point-to-point integrations by 64%
If you’re interested in learning more about how your company could simplify the day-to-day management of EDI, take a closer look at Orderful. Orderful has EDI experts ready to discuss your company’s specific needs. Speak to an expert today and let the specialists know that you heard about Orderful on Let’s Talk About Supply Chain.
