What is EDI ?

The main difference between EDI and simply sending email with EDI information, is the set of rigorous standards involved with following the EDI format. These standards were put in place to ensure that companies who use EDI as their method of information transfer were being diligent about security, and conforming to the proper procedures of the protocol.

The other difference, is that EDI is for the most part handled by computer systems; human intervention is usually only required when there are errors to address. In this way, it needs to follow a seamless data transfer process by which the data set being sent to the receiving machine is accepted and confirmed with no down-time.

Over time, EDI and the web began to live harmoniously. In fact, those businesses that have used EDI as their data transfer methodology have leveraged the Internet to send their EDI documents, instead of what some thought would happen: the Internet replacing EDI. If anything , the Internet has simply facilitated the transfer of EDI documents.

EDI has been used in the past primarily by automotive and retail businesses, however in the past few years, the format has been more widely adopted. Manufacturing, healthcare, pharmaceutical, utility and construction companies are good examples of EDI clients. Here are some of Commport's trusted partners. 

Basically, any type of business that deals with large amounts of identical paperwork/form data can directly benefit from adopting an EDI solution. The benefits over using a paper system are clear:

• immense savings in time
• significant cost savings
• reduced drain on resources overall
• reduced error rates in data transfer (we almost want to say ‘eliminate’ here!)
• improved security of data being transfered
• reliability – you can have confidence that data is reaching its destination

EDI solutions (Electronic Data Interchange) are designed to help you manage this massive amount of paperwork. The considerations for savings in time, potential errors from mistyped or incorrectly logged information, not to mention the impact on the environment—all of these are important considerations when you’re looking into an Edi solution for your business.

If your business model is based on having a series of processes that are labour intensive—yet completely necessary—in regards to a huge amount of work required to keep things running, then you will want to consider an EDI solution.

First of all, lay out your process for handling documents from one side of the chain to the next. What is the process? Does it require a great amount of manual intervention? Think of how many places in the process where a human agent is necessary to move the process to the next stage.

Think about how much variation exists between documents. Consider that with an EDI solution, there should be seamless migration from one system to another. The less human intervention required, the better the system will perform.

Next, identify your internal network. What are you currently using to move your processes forward? How would you benefit from having an EDI solution in place? What would it replace? Have you considered the time and energy considerations for implementing an EDI solution?

Plan out your workflow. Once your documents have been brought to a certain level, how are they to be passed to the next stage?

Once you have identified these steps, you will be that much more prepared to integrate an EDI solution to manage a lot of the legwork currently going into your document tracking and submitting process.

What type of infrastructure do you need to have in place? The great thing about modern EDI solutions (Commport offers several solutions, including EDI software solutions like CyberLiNK) you do not have to have more than an Internet connection and the proper software installed to make use of the many advantages of EDI. The nature of Commport’s solutions is to apply optimum security right out of the gate, so you don’t even have to think about it.