SaaS adds more value to EDI

With more and more off our customers we are happily finding ways to add value to the normal EDI processing that has been experienced with older, on-site solutions.

Firstly new acronyms are appearing, for example EIPP (Electronic Invoice Presentation and Payment). Sceptics might call this EDI invoices and BACS. I shall explore the differences in a future post.

For a lot of our users, up until about 18 months ago, traditional EDI with a hint of XML for spice, was just fine. But we have started to notice a sea change in the requirements for EDI. Obviously there is the move towards AS2 and other methods of sending and receiving data. We have been using AS2 for our customers for nearly 4 years but in the past 18 months the adoption rate has accelerated markedly. This is a great move, it reduces the costs of EDI and adds value by removing the latency built in to most EDI processes by the nature of the timed connections.

We have also seen a move to increased data requirements. This has proved difficult for some users as it was not always easy, as I am sure you will realise, to modify their ERP system to process the additional data. However they often had the additional data in "Non EDI" data, for example catalogues, or even the incoming documents such as Purchase Orders.

Because of the nature of our SaaS solution, being based around the concept that all data has value whatever the format, plus the fact that the solution is based on a repository we have been able to take these disparate data sources and merge them to create enhanced EDI messages that the recipient requires. This would be a real struggle with traditional on-site systems.

Over the next few months we intend to expand the use of such solutions to both enhance customer data, add functionality to the user experience of the service and to provide translations of product codes, units of measure, delivery points and many other requirements that are becoming the norm for the modern EDI message exchange.

By adding more value to EDI messages we believe that adoption will accelerate through the next 10 years.