ECommerce is on the rise. Buyers want access to everything from the comfort of their laptop or phone, and customer journeys that span multiple channels have become the new norm. Because of these and other complexities, success in digital commerce depends heavily on a smoothly functioning supply chain.

Successful online retailers are adopting electronic data interchange (EDI) solutions so they can efficiently exchange purchase orders, delivery notes, invoices, and other documents with manufacturers and suppliers in their global supply chain using a single digital platform. EDI systems can enhance your eCommerce experience in several different ways:

Fewer stockouts

Few things annoy your shoppers more than their desired product being out of stock. Even if your suppliers are completely reliable, you might forget to place replenishment orders in time.

Modern EDI solutions that integrate with your ERP and WMS software let you simplify or even automate your replenishment cycle by either notifying you or immediately placing orders with your suppliers whenever stock levels fall below a specified threshold. As a result, your customers are far less likely to experience stock-outs, which helps you maintain high customer satisfaction.

Fewer order fulfillment errors

Incorrectly keyed information can lead to your customers receiving the wrong product. They might be shipped the correct product in the wrong quantity, or if you’ve made a mistake in their delivery information, they won’t receive their order at all! Any of these errors will almost certainly lead to very irate customers and maybe even negative publicity.

EDI minimizes manual entry. You (and your supplier) won’t have to decipher someone’s messy handwriting, hunt down an email that contains order information, or risk making a mistake while rekeying an order from one program into another. More accurate order information reduces the risk of fulfillment delays, angry customers, and loss of business.

Personalization and direct shipping

More and more businesses are harnessing digital supply chain technology and consumer analytics to offer their customers made-to-order products. With real-time vendor communication solutions, retailers can keep their supply chain agile and minimize logistics and inventory costs by sending customized product orders to manufacturers so they can produce and send items directly to your customers.

You don’t need to offer product personalization services to take advantage of EDI in this way. Even if your products are mass-produced, the ability to instantly send delivery information to suppliers is a great way to drastically shorten order fulfillment times, minimize warehousing and inventory spend, and keep your customers happy.

Real-time special order availability

Some online retailers allow their customers to place special orders for items they don’t usually keep in inventory. However, most of these retailers don’t have an up-to-the-minute record of their suppliers’ stock levels or delivery times, which means their online store doesn’t tell their customers how soon they’ll receive these items. More often than not, customers decide to look elsewhere for the item they wanted, and the retailer misses out on a sale.

EDI integration can give your customers real-time information about special order availability and wait times. Even if you don’t keep a particular item in stock, your online store can use EDI to instantly consult your supplier’s records, determine the item’s estimated delivery time, and place an order.

Conclusion

Your customers value timely replenishment, quick and accurate fulfillment, and end-to-end visibility, and digital technologies like EDI that allow you to effortlessly deliver this value represent a real competitive advantage. To learn more about how digital B2B communication drives growth and reduces customer churn, please register for our December 13 webinar, Live Demo of PartnerLinQ for Dynamics 365 FO in Retail.

Improving your supply chain efficiency with ERP-integrated EDI

In an environment of ever-changing consumer demand, your retail or manufacturing business needs to leverage every competitive advantage it has at its disposal. Modern global businesses rely on electronic data interchange (EDI) solutions to maximize operational efficiency and maintain market competitiveness.

Businesses use EDI technology to innovate on operational strategy, enhance supply chain management, and improve operational performance. Most large manufacturers and retailers coordinate their operations via EDI, from sending and receiving purchase orders and invoices to advance ship notices (ASNs) and product transfer reports.

So becoming an EDI-capable organization signals to potential trading partners that you are a trustworthy party that uses standards-based supply chain practices, and helps you unlock the door to global trade. However, EDI’s primary advantage lies in the vast improvements in operational efficiency it offers over paper-based processes.

Even though EDI promotes uniformity through the use of communication standards, not all EDI solutions are created equal. Many older EDI systems only use one EDI format and don’t support any modern, non-EDI communication standards. Many of these legacy systems (and even some newer “web EDI” solutions) require users to manually key in information, and may even require them to manually initiate and end the EDI transfer!

Advantages of EDI ERP Integration on a Modern Supply Chain Connectivity Solution

These methods, while better than using paper documents and a courier service, are ancient relics from the 20th century. If your organization still uses this kind of software, you should make it a priority to have it replaced with a supply chain connectivity solution that integrates directly with your ERP software. Here are three ways that an ERP-integrated EDI solution significantly improves efficiency:

Minimal Manual Entry

Direct EDI ERP integration means that you’ll hardly ever need to manually type information to send it to a vendor (or type received information back into your ERP system).

Since all information on your products, pricing, inventory, sales transactions, customers, and deliveries are already stored in your ERP system, you’ll usually be able to select the information you want to send with a few clicks. Then, depending on your operating procedures, you can either transmit that information to the appropriate trading partner right away or add it to a scheduled batch transfer.

More advanced EDI solutions will also confirm that the ERP information that you’re about to send complies with your trading partners’ internal policies for those specific document types. This is definitely much quicker and more convenient than consulting a separate compliance checklist for each vendor every time you transmit information.

By reducing its dependence on manual entry, your organization will spend less time managing information transfers, correcting transcription errors, and running damage control due to the errors you failed to catch in time. You’ll also improve supplier relationships and save a surprising amount of money on EDI chargebacks caused by noncompliant information transfers.

Rapid Partner Onboarding

A well-designed supply chain connectivity solution also improves efficiency by speeding up the onboarding of new trading partners. Instead of requiring days of configuration, modern EDI systems use intelligent field-mapping techniques to automatically reconcile your partners’ data and document formats with your own. The sooner you complete the onboarding process, the sooner you experience the benefits of a digital supply chain connectivity solution.

Agile Decision-Making

A seamless EDI ERP integration also allows you to start using advanced, ERP-integrated analytics tools to gain a better understanding of your trading partners. In the same way that your ERP system’s dynamic dashboards and advanced reporting capabilities provide actionable insights about your organization’s internal processes, they will also begin providing clear, easy-to-understand intelligence on how each of your vendors is performing.

Now you can anticipate and adapt to supply-side changes more quickly. Decision-makers will have access to the information they need to respond to emerging opportunities and challenges in real time.

Industry-leading EDI solution providers like PartnerLinQ provide end-to-end ERP-integrated solutions that drive efficiency by minimizing manual entry, expediting partner onboarding, and enhancing decision-making agility. Contact Us to request a demo.

The success of your business is inextricably linked to the performance of your supply chain. Even intermittent hiccups in replenishment schedules or minor inaccuracies in demand forecasting can quickly become sources of uncertainty, fulfillment delays, and major business risk. Keeping in constant contact with your suppliers and other vendors is the simplest way to avoid these issues.

However, exchanging complex business requirements and important documents comes with challenges of its own. Here are a few supply chain communication issues that retailers commonly experience, and ways that dedicated digital solutions address these challenges.

Poor Document Management

Many businesses rely heavily on email for a wide range of day-to-day business processes, including coordinating orders and invoices with their suppliers. While email is far more convenient than phone calls and conventional mail, it’s still a very inefficient and error-prone way to conduct business.

Imagine creating a purchase order as a PDF and sending it to your supplier via email, only to realize that you forgot to attach the actual PO document! Or how about those times when you spend precious minutes hunting for the right invoice or PO through hundreds of emails? Maybe you saved the email attachments to a separate folder on your computer, and you’re not sure which file is the most recent version. Maybe you need to find out how many POs you sent to each of your suppliers this week… When you’re working against the clock to fulfill orders on time, these aren’t the sort of details you should be spending your time on.

Specialized digital solutions for communicating with trading partners and suppliers is much faster and more convenient than email. Instead of preparing a paper document, scanning it, attaching it to an email and sending the email to the right address, you can send the same information from your organization’s ERP system directly to your supplier or partner’s ERP system. This kind of partner integration provides fewer opportunities for manual error, and takes far less time and effort.

Incompatible Partner Standards

Dozens of data formats and data transport protocols exist, so it shouldn’t surprise you to discover that your suppliers use different standards than you do. Some use XML while others use JSON. Some might even use their own proprietary formats.

It isn’t just data formats that differ from partner to partner. Each organization has its own set of business rules that it applies to each type of document the send or receive, or even to specific segments or fields in a document. Fail to comply with these rules and you might be asked to prepare and send those documents again eliminate the complexity caused by mismatched standards by intelligently translating between different standards and keeping track of each vendor’s unique set of business rules. These features are especially useful when you need to onboard a new trading partner quickly.

Scalability

If your company only sends fifteen or twenty business documents a day, email might actually be a workable solution for vendor communication. However, as soon as your business grows and you begin to send fifty to a hundred documents each day, relying on email will cripple your operations. Put simply, email fails to scale.

Modern organizations need to plan ahead and choose communication systems that can support peak transactional workloads, even if their business growth exceeds all expectations. Modern partner communication solutions are designed to process thousands of transactions an hour without any noticeable slowdowns. If your communication infrastructure becomes sluggish under high workloads, your efficiency will suffer, and so will your bottom line.

Each of the pain points mentioned above can wreak havoc on your ability to align inventory with demand and efficiently fulfill orders, and ultimately result in business risk, lower margins, or even loss of business. A scalable supply chain communication solution that integrates with your organization’s ERP platform is a worthwhile investment, and if you don’t have a modern system in place already, now is the time to explore your options.

PartnerLinQ is an innovative, process-centric B2B integration solution that enables progressive organizations to build their digital partner extensible platform leveraging APIs and robust EDI capabilities.

With PartnerlinQ, organizations in most industries including fulfillment (3PL), retail, Ecommerce, wholesale, and distribution can achieve operational efficiencies through streamlined B2B communication and real-time visibility. PartnerlinQ brings management of all forms of B2B interchange including EDI, real time APIs, and file based/proprietary formats into a cohesive solution which is easy to use and manage.

PartnerlinQ requires zero customization to Dynamics 365 for Operations and Dynamics AX 2012 to make your ERP EDI ready.

PartnerLinQ Features and Benefits:

• Designed for ease of use in managing EDI
• Rapid partner on boarding based on hundreds of preconfigured EDI transaction and partner mappings
• Powerful and configurable business rule engine for automating document exchange
• Driven by business processes, beyond traditional point-to-point EDI interchange
• Supports APIs for Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Jet, Amazon, DHL, UPS, and others.
• Unified management and workflow of all B2B communication channels
• Centralized B2B communication through a scalable and reliable solution
• Supports small package shipment and tracking
• Responsive solution that identifies and reports issues before they put business relationships at risk
• Highly scalable – Cutting edge, server-class architecture on Azure platform that scales to handle extreme seasonal spikes
• Browser based access, built-in reporting and notification capabilities

The PartnerLinQ solution is a fully managed cloud solution with complete EDI/B2B management professional services. PartnerLinQ is also available as licensed solution managed entirely by the customer. For more information please contact PartnerLinQ.

For many enterprises EDI is the main source of how revenue flows into the business. It’s often considered the lifeblood of a company. If not done well there can be a great deal of risk and hardship.

Managing an EDI campaign requires a specific knowledge base that few have. Different from other areas of business these skills are not widely carried across the majority of today’s technical staffs. Generally companies are lucky to have a small handful of people with this unique background. This makes choosing the correct software/service provider and delivery model imperative to avoid problems that could damage customer relationships and cash flow.

Many other technology platforms that companies invest in have inherent cross training. CRM and ERP environments often have large teams of people that work on them and in them on a daily basis. This is rarely the case with EDI.

For years companies didn’t have much choice when it came to B2B community enablement. They are mandated to participate by their trading partners and this would require them to buy software and hire the appropriate technical talent. Fortunately today there are choices. Some still buy the software, maintain the environment and staff required. Some take advantage of other delivery models and offload much of the heavy lifting when it comes to EDI.

There are three general delivery models to choose from:

• On premise / self-managed
• Hosted / self-managed
• Cloud / managed service

On premise / self-managed model has been around for forty years. This is a common choice for companies that still desire to keep everything in-house and don’t assign a great deal of importance to a cloud strategy.

Hosted / self-managed model is similar. The end user still needs to maintain the staff with the required skillset. Their EDI environment may be collocated in an offsite data center but the company is still responsible for the daily maintenance of the environment, adding transaction sets / trading partners and error resolution.

With the prevalence of cloud based ERP and CRM solutions today the two models above, for some, make less sense and carry a risk of failure. Getting and keeping EDI capable people has become difficult. Companies that have made the decision to implement a cloud/managed service delivered ERP/CRM see the value in outsourcing.

When making a decision on which direction and delivery model to choose a company needs to look a three things. Does this provider line up with your cloud strategy? Do you want to maintain EDI capabilities in-house? Do you see the value and reduced risk involved with today’s cloud/managed service delivery? The answers to these three questions should help point you in the right direction. To learn more please Contact PartnerLinQ.

EDI Solutions for Dynamics 365

Complete EDI, B2B and API solution for frictionless partner communication.

Exchanging business data with other organizations can be expensive and technically challenging:

• Many EDI solutions fail to scale to high volumes and become sluggish under peak loads
• Standalone EDI systems need to be maintained separately from ERP platforms and create a disconnect between EDI processing and other business processes.
• Your partner will use probably different EDI platforms and data formats than your own.

Traditional EDI platforms have multiple limitations. Partner onboarding can be time-consuming and frustrating, and communicating with partners that don’t use EDI requires expensive, difficult-to-maintain customization. Complicated error tracking, poor transaction visibility, and vendor rule management lead to expensive chargebacks that can severely impact your margins.

PartnerLinQ simplifies partner onboarding by supporting business rule-based transactions with businesses with existing EDI setups as well as non-EDI businesses. Its advanced business rule engine and extensive pre-configured business rule library make it easy to configure, save, and reuse business rules for multiple partner organizations and EDI scenarios.

PartnerLinQ can be configured to generate alerts that are triggered when specific conditions are met, and can be used to quickly identify EDI bottlenecks or errors. These notifications are a critical component of PartnerLinQ’s error handling functionality and can help reduce business costs by preventing chargebacks and low transaction throughput.