Business Intelligence
Many people don’t believe EDI-based reports are useful. Naysayers believe ERP solutions provide these reports independently. This is the wrong view in my opinion. First, you have to consider the types of reports requested. You could find out what your sales to a client are from EDI – but, you are right, such a simple report can be provided by your accounting application. Instead, try to think about some information they don’t report on – here are some examples:
1. Variances between ordered, shipped, invoiced, remittance, etc.
2. Sales, sell thru, fill rates by store, item, product category, etc.
3. Charge back causing exceptions to processes (For example: late ASN, or invoice-to-ASN)
4. Effectiveness of partners such as 3PLs, transportation companies or others
By treating all of the documents you trade with a client/supplier as a “Process” (Business process), you can gain significantly more information from your reports. Processes consist of electronic documents and applied business rules. For example, an active order-to-cash process may consist of an order, shipping document (ASN), invoice and other related documents, including FA (EDI 997s). The business rules applied to documents within the business process and optionally to other external data sources are used to generate alerts, populate reports, scorecards, and dashboards. The instance of the processes is triggered by receiving any of the documents in the process. Treating ‘grouped’ business documents with applied business rules as a process allows us to measure gaps between events as well as the data included in each of the documents.