EDI Solutions
Intuitive Systems is here to enable your business through EDI.
Learn how to harness EDI for fewer errors, real time transactions, lower administrative costs, and faster turn-around time for business processes, and 24/7 availability.
What is EDI?
Electronic Data Interchange.
EDI is widely-used technology for the automated exchange of documents between dissimilar applications. It allows value chain partners to exchange purchase orders, invoices, advance ship notices and other business documents directly from one business system to the other, without human intervention. There are in general term 2 types of EDI. Formal and informal.
What is Formal EDI?
Formal is where you have two or more major companies engaged in EDI via and EDI VAN and generally share one standard, e.g., UN-EDIFACT. This is really good but the EDI budget will be in the millions per annum and any setup and or any changes will take weeks and huge dollars.
What is Informal EDI?
Informal, these solutions apply to the vast majority of NZ business, SME (Small to Medium sized enterprise) where (e.g.) a companies financial/accounting system is able to out-put (and if sophisticated input) certain files, e.g. an invoice electronically and want to trade with both local and overseas companies of perhaps a similar size.
They do not have a multi million dollar EDI budget. The communication standard will vary significantly, essentially each end is a disparate system. But fear not, this is what Intuitive Systems specialize in. Setting up you own EDI/ecommerce platform to trade with numerous and variable partners here or overseas.
What is driving EDI?
In general, it could be said it is the large organisations, be they manufacturers or retailers wanting to drive down the cost of the supply chain. From this comes both upstream and downstream pressure to the related parties involved in this sales or supply channel.
So, how do we get enabled?
Once you have made the commitment to become EDI enabled, our team will consult with you to create a suitable EDI environment. This could be a simple one to one relationship for the moment. Or you may want to quickly engage with trading with all your suppliers and customers. Either way Intuitive Systems can manage all the process and advise on a suitable solution. If you have some internal resources, how much of the solution we do is entirely up to you and often we work jointly with customers in-house IT team.
Once we have a customer to link you up to, it all starts with, what messages/formats do they require?
There is usually a ‘Message/format Implementation Guide’ made available by them explaining their message requirements in great technical detail. Sometimes this does not exist and so will become part of the project itself.
Intuitive Systems will already understand much of this information, so there may be minimal need to examine the detailed message specifications.
Intuitive Systems solutions are always tailored to meet the exact requirement for your project from both a technical and business point of view.
The most common e-commerce messages used are Sales Invoices and Sales Orders, as these represent the largest numbers of documents to be exchanged in a trading relationship.
It is useful to find out the likely volumes you will be exchanging as this will have an impact on solution design.