EDI Order Fulfillment - Electronic Data Interchange

 
You have just been told by Wal-Mart, the largest retail chain on the planet, that you can no longer count on Wal-Mart remaining a customer unless you adopt EDI.

Manufacturers and suppliers need to be in “technology sync” with their big box customers (K-Mart, Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart and others). They must have back office technology which communicates with the paperless environment now found with most large retail companies like Wal-Mart and Target.  There is an urgent need for this technology.  These large companies realize that they lose profits every time a piece of paper needs to be handled and dealt with by a human being .  As a result, they are basically telling suppliers to either get EDI, or they will no longer be able to do business with them.

Generally speaking, EDI is considered to be a technical representation of a business conversation between two entities, either internal or external. Note, there is a perception that "EDI" consists of the entire electronic data interchange paradigm, including the transmission, message flow, document format, and software used to interpret the documents. EDI is considered to describe the rigorously standardized format of electronic documents.

 and other similar technologies save a company money by providing an alternative to, or replacing information flows that require a great deal of human interaction and materials such as paper documents, meetings, faxes, etc. Even when paper documents are maintained in parallel with EDI exchange, e.g. printed shipping manifests, electronic exchange and the use of data from that exchange reduces the handling costs of sorting, distributing, organizing, and searching paper documents. EDI and similar technologies allow a company to take advantage of the benefits of storing and manipulating data electronically without the cost of manual entry or scanning

There are a few barriers to adopting electronic data interchange. One of the most significant barriers is the accompanying business process change. Existing business processes built around slow paper handling may not be suited for EDI and would require changes to accommodate automated processing of business documents. For example, a business may receive the bulk of their goods by 1 or 2 day shipping and all of their invoices by mail. The existing process may therefore assume that goods are typically received before the invoice. With EDI, the invoice will typically be sent when the goods ship and will therefore require a process that handles large numbers of invoices whose corresponding goods have not yet been received.

Specialty Fulfillment Center can utilize EDI for your trading parties. We can assist you in developing a solution. There are solutions to fit your needs.