EDI Can Make You Feel Good and Improve Your Business

When we started developing the technology for exchanging EDI messages many moons ago, we obviously wanted to develop a software solution that would provide a service businesses would want to purchase, because without that we do not have a business ourselves. But we were also determined to ensure that the product and service were such that our customers would be able to see a return on their investment, unlike a lot of software that promises great ROI, but provides non.

We determined that the way to do that was to reduce any technical input from our customers to a minimum (reduce their costs of set-up), integrate messages to our customer's ERP systems when practical (some systems just could not cope with an electronic remittance for example) and to eliminate the need for them to change their systems to cope with our integration standard (You would be amazed how many times we have heard that from other people).

People keep buying the software and people keep renewing their licence so one could assume that we are continuing to get it right. But a better test in when customers actually talk to us and recently, as part of our program to achieve ISO 9000:2000 accreditation, we have be performing customer feedback surveys.

It's great when customers tell us what they would like from us next, as it means we do not have to keep coming up with all the new ideas. But in following up on the feedback, and expanding beyond the normal survey type questions, it was even better to find customers saying things like EDI has helped us achieve strategic alliances or we don't even notice the EDI is there it just works or we have dramatically increased the amount of e-trading we conduct. It makes you feel good when you can help someone else achieve success.

We aimed to provide the best SaaS for EDI in the UK and Europe, and the customers will judge us on that, but we also wanted to actually add value to our customers businesses and this also appears to be happening. Electronic message exchange for businesses has always had the potential to drive cost out of business but it was always perceived as a bit too much of a dark art.

Now with the combination of SaaS EDI where the actually mapping is done on the SaaS, not just a Web App you have to use, plus the best levels of customer service this is coming to fruition, and even adding to strategic business alliances.

The future of Electronic Message exchange is SaaS, the old technology of a piece of software deployed on a pc or server on site cannot deliver the flexibility needed for today's EDI.

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?