How to Set up EDI for Retail at Scale and Avoid Slowed Growth

If you’ve been in retail long enough, you know the truth about EDI:  It’s never just EDI. 

On paper, EDI is simple: send purchase orders, receive acknowledgments, ship orders, invoice, repeat.  

But in the real world, retail EDI lives inside a system of fulfillment models, trading partner rules, compliance mandates, item-level requirements, pricing exceptions, and customer service fire drills. And as retail operations grow more complex, EDI becomes either a competitive advantage or the bottleneck that slows everything down. 

That was the focus of our recent webinar with Sunrise Technologies, where TrueCommerce leaders joined Sunrise and retail ERP experts to discuss what it really takes to build a scalable, reliable EDI foundation-especially for retailers navigating complexity at scale. 

Rather than treating EDI as a “set it and forget it” integration, the session explored why modern EDI must be designed around the realities of retail operations. 

Below are three of the most common traps retailers run into when trying to scale EDI-and how the webinar panel recommended solving them. 

Trap #1: Treating EDI Like a Document Pipeline Instead of a Retail Process 

When teams talk about “mastering EDI,” the conversation often starts with documents:  

850s, 856s, 810s, and 997s. And yes, those matter. But during the webinar, TrueCommerce’s Michelle Hernick emphasized an important point: 

“One PO doesn’t always mean one shipment or one invoice. EDI has to reflect how the business actually works, not just how documents move.”

In retail, the business almost never behaves like a straight line. 

A single PO may be split across warehouses. A single order may ship in multiple waves. Some items may be drop -shipped while others ship from a distribution center. Labeling rules can change by retailer. ASN requirements vary. Routing guides differ. And compliance expectations only tighten as retailers scale. 

When EDI is implemented as a simple document “pipe,” it breaks the moment retail complexity shows up.  

And when it breaks, it doesn’t break quietly, it breaks with: 

• Delayed shipments
• Rejected ASNs
• Invoice disputes
• Compliance violations
• Chargebacks

The webinar panelists reinforced that retailers don’t need EDI that simply moves documents. They need EDI that supports how retail actually operates day to day. 

Trap #2: Building ERP and EDI in Silos and Paying for It Later 

One of the strongest themes from the session was that EDI success is rarely a technical issue.  

It’s an alignment issue. 

Sunrise Technologies’ Cameron Caudill highlighted that EDI projects fail most often when teams scope EDI as a generic integration, separate from the retail process. 

The reality is: your ERP, your EDI, and your business workflows are inseparable. 

If you implement a new ERP and treat EDI as a separate track that can “catch up later,” you usually end up in one of two scenarios: 

1. You go live late, because EDI testing reveals process gaps you didn’t account for

2. You go live on time, but spend months afterward managing manual workarounds 

In retail, workarounds don’t stay small, they compound.  

A pricing mismatch becomes a customer service escalation. A missed labeling rule becomes a compliance issue. A fulfillment exception becomes a chargeback. 

The panel emphasized that the retailers who scale successfully are the ones who align ERP and EDI fbefore go-live-so that order types, partner rules, fulfillment logic, and exceptions are designed together. At the end of the day, EDI isn’t a bolt-on. It’s part of the operating system. 

Trap #3: Leaving Business Teams Blind While Exceptions Pile Up

If there’s one retail reality that doesn’t get enough attention, it’s this: customer service and operations teams are often the ones responsible for solving EDI problems, but they’re the last ones to see them. 

In many retail organizations, EDI visibility lives in the hands of a small technical team. That means business users can’t easily answer questions like: 

• Did the retailer receive the ASN?
• Was the invoice accepted or rejected?
• Is the order on hold due to a pricing issue?
• Did a validation error occur?
• Where exactly did the process break?

The webinar discussion made it clear that modern retail EDI needs to support business-user visibility, not just IT oversight.  

This is where embedded EDI inside your ERP becomes a game changer. 

Instead of forcing teams to log into a separate system or rely on IT for status checks, embedded EDI allows users to view order status, pricing exceptions, and document flow directly within the ERP interface.  

That means issues are caught earlier, resolved faster, and far less likely to snowball into missed SLAs or compliance penalties. 

In retail, visibility isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between being proactive and being constantly reactive. 

A Real Example: Vera Bradley

One of the most compelling parts of the webinar was the Vera Bradley example, shared by TrueCommerce’s Chris Panneton. 

Vera Bradley’s move to Microsoft Dynamics 365 SCM created an important turning point: their legacy EDI system was no longer built to support the scale and complexity of their modern retail operations. They needed a solution that was built for growth – and designed to work inside their ERP. 

With TrueCommerce EDI embedded in Dynamics 365 and Sunrise supporting the ERP enablement, Vera Bradley gained: 

• Embedded validation tables directly inside Dynamics 365
• A user interface designed for business users
• Streamlined workflows for handling pricing discrepancies, drop-ship orders, and customer-specific requirements

The result was fewer errors, less manual intervention, a more scalable retail operation., and most importantly: an EDI foundation aligned with the way their business actually runs. 

The Bottom Line: Mastering EDI Means Designing for the Modern Day

Retailers don’t need EDI that works in perfect conditions.  

They need EDI that works when retail gets messy – because it always does. 

The webinar made one thing clear: mastering EDI isn’t about moving documents faster. It’s about building an EDI foundation that supports real-world retail complexity, protects compliance, and gives business teams the visibility they need to keep operations moving. 

When EDI is aligned with ERP and business processes, everything else speeds up: 

• Order flow
• Fulfillment
• Invoicing
• Compliance
• Trading partner relationships

And when it isn’t? It becomes the bottleneck that slows everything down. 

Watch the Webinar On Demand 

If you couldn’t attend live, you can watch the full session on demand, here.