5 Ways EDI Helps Your Business to Grow

EDI is renowned for improving business efficiency, increasing accuracy and reducing costs, however the biggest benefit is often overlooked: the opportunity for business and revenue growth. Businesses are often very happy to continue as they have been doing and go by the age old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, as you’d never think of something that’s restricting to be broken.

Why do I need to adopt EDI to grow our network?

We are currently trading perfectly well with all of our suppliers and customers using standard paper based documents.

1. Many organisations only trade via EDI

By not adopting EDI, you are almost certainly limiting your business growth as many organisations will only trade electronically due to the cost efficiencies and time it saves their business. This is generally seen with larger retailers or organisations with enough power to stipulate electronic trading throughout their network, however it is also becoming increasingly common to find that smaller businesses are opting for digital commerce only.

2. Increase profits through automating the process

By automating the process, less resource is needed to reconcile invoices and process paper-based documents, reducing administrative cost. Not only that, being able to receive invoices via EDI allows for faster handling by your Accounts Payable team, meaning you could benefit from early payment discounts if these are offered by your suppliers. Any additional profit can be invested back into the business to improve growth.

3. Improves relationships with your customers and suppliers

By streamlining processes and operations, your team have better visibility of order fulfilment and can therefore offer a better, and faster, service to your customers.

Being able to trade via EDI helps maintain another vital relationship, the one with your suppliers. Being able to communicate quickly and easily with your suppliers reduces costs, and increases transparency with your transactions. Furthermore, by being able to pay invoices on-time, helps you to become a preferred customer. And the best customers get the best deals and priority treatment.

4. More time to focus on the core business function

A major benefit of adopting EDI for any business is that it frees up valuable time for key tasks. By automating the process, less time is needed to process paper-based documents allowing for more time to be spent on business development and other game changing tasks including product development and moving into new markets.

5. Electronically trade with smaller suppliers and customers

Trading electronically doesn’t just have to be with larger suppliers and customers. By taking advantage of customer or supplier web based portal solutions, you can expand your trading network and onboard smaller organisations. They can place orders or send invoices online which you can receive straight into your order management or ERP system meaning that your orders and invoices are managed in one place, and never get missed.

EDI solutions from TrueCommerce

TrueCommerce offers businesses of any size a scalable EDI solution to meet their business needs. Using our in-depth experience of electronic trading, we have designed a managed service solution that can be tailored to meet the precise requirements of any organisation.

For smaller businesses, we have our web EDI solution, and for larger organisations we offer a solution that integrates straight into your ERP system. All TrueCommerce EDI solutions are supported by our fully managed service where a team of specialists provide continuity of service through proactive support.
Leading companies including:

If you’re looking at ways to grow your business contact us to find out how we can help you by streamlining your trading.

DOWNLOAD BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO EDI

Contributor: Richard Gallacher is a Marketing Executive here at TrueCommerce. As a key member of the marketing team, Richard provides insightful, accessible information to help businesses improve and grow their operations. Richard is based in our Manchester office.