Five key benefits of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

The benefits of electronic trading are well documented. Here are the top five reasons why businesses adopt EDI.

Benefit One: Remove document re-keying

By removing the manual keying of key business documents such as Orders, Invoices, Acknowledgments and Despatch Notes your company can benefit significantly from:

reduced labour costs
elimination of human keying errors
faster document processing
instant document retrieval
removal of reliance on the postal service.

Benefit Two: Eliminate paper

Paper-based trading relationships have some inherent disadvantages when compared with their electronic trading equivalents:

stationery and printer consumable costs
document storage costs
lost documents
postage costs.

Benefit Three: Reduce lead times and stockholding

Electronic trading documents can be delivered far more quickly than their paper counterparts, thus the turnaround time from order to delivery can be reduced.
By using EDI for forecasting and planning, companies are able to get forward warning of likely orders and plan their production and stock levels accordingly.
Companies receiving Advanced Shipping Notes or Acknowledgments know in advance what is actually going to be delivered and are made aware of shortages so alternate supplies can be sourced.
Integrating electronic documents means they can be processed much faster, again reducing lead times and speeding up payments.

Benefit Four: Increase the quality of the trading relationship

Electronic trading documents, when printed, are much easier to read than copies faxed or generated on multi-part stationery by impact printers.
Accurate documents help to ensure accurate supplies.
Batches of electronic documents are usually sequentially numbered, therefore missing documents can easily be identified - saving companies the trouble of wading through piles of paper.

Benefit Five: Competitive edge

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) makes you attractive to deal with from your customers' point of view, so in their eyes you are cheaper and more efficient to deal with than a competitor trading on paper. Your costs will be lower because you will require less manpower to process orders, deliveries or payments.

It is no accident that the leading UK retailers all rely on EDI for placing orders and receiving invoices - they know the benefits they get and the costs that can be saved.

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A Simple Definition Of EDI

6 Easy Steps To EDI Implementation

Five Key Benefits Of EDI

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