How to optimize business processes with EDI

Have you ever thought about how you can reduce unnecessary administrative work in your company? Improving and digitizing business processes is a sensible starting point. However, communication with business partners also holds great potential for optimization. In the following article, we explain how EDI and EDIFACT can help you with this and how JTL-Wawi comes into play:

EDI / EDIFACT - What is it actually?

But let’s start at the beginning: EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange and refers to the paperless exchange of structured data between business partners, such as sales orders, order confirmations, delivery bills and invoices. EDIFACT is not only a common EDI standard, but also the standard of the United Nations and thus the basis for a uniform exchange of information across industry and national borders.

Instead of printing out documents and receipts when communicating with your business partners, you can save and transmit the information from your ERP system in a file. To ensure that your business partners can read the message, the majority of companies use EDIFACT as the most commonly used standard.

The advantages of EDI

With the integration of EDI into your ERP, you no longer have any system breaks between your processes. This means that users from the specialist departments can also view and check information directly via EDI messages. Of course, the setup and monitoring also takes place in your system.

The following advantages speak in favor of using EDI:

• Reduce costs
  The costs for document processing vary depending on your staffing levels and individual number of suppliers. As a rule of thumb, you can assume that processing a paper order costs up to 25 euros. Now you can ask yourself: How many orders do you receive per year? 10.000? 100.000? The potential to reduce your costs with EDI is therefore enormous.
• Reduce the error rate
  Roughly estimated, companies with manual document entry post between 2% and 5% of documents incorrectly. These can be incorrect order quantities, incorrect delivery quantities or even incorrect and missing order items. Your company has to bear the additional costs and time that this entails. Don’t waste valuable resources, reduce the error rate with EDI.
• Increase transparency
  Paper orders must first be processed: When you look at your figures, you can never be sure that everything has actually been booked in. Is there still a pile in a drawer somewhere? Digital processes with your business partners increase transparency.
• Increase speed
  It can take a good 3 days for an order to be sent to you by post from the customer and then manually booked into your system. Good, valuable time that could be better spent on resource planning – especially if you have fixed delivery dates. With EDI, digital documents are in your system within seconds and can be processed directly.

Linking EDI messages with your documents

The full integration of EDI in JTL-Wawi provides you with links between your documents and the corresponding EDI messages. This allows you to navigate seamlessly from the message to the process. What’s special about us is that our EDI system is directly integrated into your ERP and, thanks to open standards, it also works with systems from other partners.

You can read about how the electronic data exchange in JTL-Wawi works in detail in our previous guest article on this topic.

Involve business partners and exploit the full potential

However, you can only exploit the full potential of EDI integration in JTL-Wawi if you also involve your business partners in the optimization process. However, convincing business partners to exchange sales orders, purchase orders, invoices, etc. with you digitally in the future can take a lot of time and can sometimes be exhausting.

How to get your business partners on board: our EDI onboarding service

We support you in convincing your business partners of the benefits of using EDI. Your digitalization project with us also includes a professional and technical process for your suppliers. From direct contact in coordination with you to telephone support. Our helpdesk handles queries and thus reduces the workload for your IT organization.

Would you like to find out more about EDI and our services? Take a look at our video:

Are you interested in integrating EDI into JTL-Wawi and digitizing your business processes?