As it has been for decades, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) continues to be a pertinent data-driven technology for organizations around the world.
Essentially, it empowers companies across different industries such as healthcare, retail, and others to exchange disparate customer data streams between multiple business partner ecosystems using a standardized format.
However, organizations that leverage legacy EDI software solutions to implement data exchanges face many problems. As a matter of fact, legacy solutions complicate the process of data exchange and sharing and force companies into low gear. Some of the problems are:
- It takes weeks or sometimes even months of calendar time to onboard new customers into their existing business ecosystems.
- These solutions provide little support to APIs, which forces companies to manage communication silos.
- Legacy EDI data integration software solutions provide poor visibility into transactions. This keeps business analysts and non-EDI developers at bay on various business transactions.
- IT teams have to implement long custom codes and perform extensive data mappings, so they fail to focus on other high-value tasks.
To address these problems, companies need to reimagine EDI integration solutions. This way, they’ll be able to exchange data and deliver the value promised to customers in the age of digital transformation.
Companies today rely on modern-day technologies such as self-service data integration to empower non-technical business users to exchange data between multiple business partners. However, before understanding the importance of these reimagined solutions, let’s delve into the benefits of B2B EDI integration solutions.
An Overview of EDI Integration
B2B EDI integration solutions enable organizations to exchange complex, bi-directional data streams in two simple steps:
- Support EDI documents, protocols, transactions, and endpoints that empower all business users to automatically exchange data with various trading partners.
- Translate EDI data into a format to provide support to back-end technical environments. Then, both sides use the same data format and communicate and transact to deliver value quickly.
The files or data can be converted into proprietary formats, including JSON and Idoc. The translated data is then ingested into proprietary file formats, including JSON and Idoc. Finally, the translated data is ingested into back-end systems for various purposes. EDI data integration empowers companies to deliver the value promised to customers in multiple ways:
1. It Increases Data Accuracy: EDI integration solutions help companies automate EDI transactions and other processes, including data ingestion and transformation. Because these solutions leverage automation, the risks of errors, incorrect document handling, and other discrepancies reduce to a minimum. Companies no longer need to rely on manual processes to implement data connections and exchange data.
2. It Accelerates Business Cycles: EDI data integration solutions help companies speed up business cycles as they facilitate process automation that significantly reduces, if not eliminates, time delays associated with manual processing. These solutions also enable companies to streamline inventory management via real-time updates.
3. It Improves Trading Partner Visibility: EDI data integration software helps companies gain visibility into processes. As even non-technical business users can ensure that data is accurate, automated, and accessed by ERP, companies can improve their ease of doing business.
Despite so many benefits, some companies still rely on legacy EDI data integration solutions to run operations, which is both complex and time-consuming. Also, it becomes difficult for companies to savor the benefits mentioned above. So, it becomes even more important to become aware of self-service data integration technology that can reimagine these legacy solutions and help companies drive value.
Impact of Self-Service on EDI Integration
Self-service data integration empowers organizations to accelerate data exchanges and B2B transactions and deliver the value promised to customers much more quickly.
Essentially, self-service integration gives the power of integrating customer data and implementing data exchanges to non-technical business users. This means that even non-techie business users can build data integrations and exchange information electronically. Also, self-service enables users to onboard customers 80 percent faster. In doing so, they can leverage features such as pre-built connectors, shared templates, dashboards, and AI-data mapping. Meanwhile, IT become free to spend their time driving other strategic business priorities.
Now, when business users can integrate and connect with customers sooner, it becomes easier for them to identify their needs and deliver accordingly. This creates delightful experiences for customers and ultimately helps companies grow new revenue streams for the business.
In short, self-service-powered solutions turbocharge the performance of their EDI mechanisms and enable companies to deliver the value promised to customers and improve their ease of doing business.
