EDI as it was intended: To Make Savings!

Imagine you had just discovered EDI, or "B2B Messaging", or "XML" or "eBusiness", or whatever you want to call it and you were the first so to do!

Imagine that you were able to examine the pros and cons and decide for yourself just where in your business you wanted to make savings, without the distracting pressures of trading partners demanding you start doing EDI etc. their way, NOW!

Imagine you were going to come at EDI asking "What's in it for me?"

You might decide you would rather use this handy discovery of yours to make savings in areas that you have hitherto (in the real World) had to leave for another day...

Now you can have your EDI via Software as a Service (SaaS), where the service provider takes care of ALL the message formats needed by the recipients and ALL the transport methods they prefer, you can literally dump some of your problems for good. I'm on about such nasty jobs as making remittance advices, printing them off, stuffing them in envelopes, pushing them through the franking machine, burning fuel (yours or the postie's) to get them into the post... and all this at the end of the month, when your staff have plenty of other work they could be doing.

Why not simply dump the remittance advices and all the messy work they entail?

You can if you want to...

How?

Just output ("dump") them as a file into the directory that your SaaS EDI system links to. The service can then collect them ALL. The rules engine pulls out those that are destined for suppliers who can accept them as EDI, translates them to the required formats to suit each recipient and sends the messages to them via the agreed transport method...

Yes, yes that's OK for those suppliers but what about all the rest that have no EDI capable of accepting remittance advices?

It couldn't be easier. They are all translated into .pdf documents, complete with your logo and livery, and sent via email to each of the other suppliers. From start to finish, the process takes only a few minutes.

We have a customer for whom it used to take ten staff three hours (of very hard work) at the end of every month to get their remittance advices printed, folded, stuffed into envelopes, franked and ready for the post collection. Now it takes one person less than ten minutes (and the work now is very easy). It is saving our customer quite a bit and needed no months and months of delay waiting for every supplier to implement stuff in some draconian "roll-out". Those with EDI get EDI, the others simply receive their remittance advices in their emails.

The service takes full advantage of what is there. The suppliers get their remittance advices, no matter what is happening to the postal service. The customer gets valuable time back whilst saving: money, paper, envelopes, fuel. It is a very eco-friendly process in which nobody loses out.

Now isn't this the sort of thing you would like to be doing with EDI?