EDI Business Solutions For Modern Industrial Effectiveness
EDI Business Solutions are used in many industries and branches where parties need to exchange data – retail, insurance, healthcare, transport and logistics etc. Big retailers such as Wal-Mart, Barnes and Noble, Target, Walgreen’s, Harrods and others apply EDI Business Solutions for electronic documents exchange with their trading partners and suppliers. They set documents format used by the company and demand from their vendors sticking to such standards. Vendors who are going to establish business relationships with the retailers must use the defined by a retailer documents standard as well.
Otherwise, there will be misunderstanding due to different document formats, their purpose and meaning.
Usually EDI Business Solutions regard the following set of electronic documents:
- PO (Purchase Order) – contains name of the ordered goods, description, quantity etc. (is sent by a retailer);
- ASN (Advanced Ship Notice/Manifest) – document that describes goods packaging: e.g. 5 pallets, 5 carton boxes on each pallet, 50 items in each carton box, total weight, size etc. (is sent by a supplier);
- Invoice – invoice for payment (is sent by a supplier);
- Remittance Advice – payment confirmation (is sent by a retailer);
- FA (Functional Acknowledgement) – special document type that is automatically sent as a conformation of an EDI document reception and contains information about unprocessed data (if there are any).
Although EDI standards contain a variety of data (possible segments) for each separate document, usually not all of the existing segments and elements are used. Companies try to choose only those sets of segments and elements that are useful for their business. In modern supply chain processes EDI for business plays the role of a connection bridge between retailers and their suppliers. But it is retailer who sets strict rules for the documents exchange process with its trade partners.
EDI Business Solutions help to reduce mistakes during documents formation, filling in and exchange as well as to unify the process of data interchange, make it automatic, set quick communication between partners, reduce costs for documents processing etc.