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.
From a Sellers perspective if I pull an aging report from my accounting application, I can see which clients owe what and even see which invoices haven’t been paid. Easy, right? What you can’t do is drill down into the unpaid invoice and see it wasn’t paid because the invoice contradicted the ASN and it certainly won’t send you an e-mail when this exception occurs or give you an on demand report of these instances. Individual in-house applications don’t provide reporting at an enterprise level. What does that mean? Your accounting, warehouse and other ERP applications don’t manage your client relationships centrally. WMS may tell you what was in an order and when it shipped, Gentran may confirm a document was acknowledged – but Even SAP/Oracle/ETC. won’t show you how your internal business processes are in conflict with those of your trading partners and tell you where the conflict took place and why. 90% of the companies selling into the Retail vertical don’t use large ERP’s anyway. For the most part they use Sage, Intuit, Microsoft and a few others. And without significant development expense, reporting across all the applications to provide a centralized view just won’t happen anyway.
The relationships we have with trading partners cover shipping, accounting, inventory, item management, translation (EDI) and other business areas. Because 99% of the communication between you and your trading partner is done using EDI – this is the best, most cost-effective place to report on that relationship – regardless of the business area being discussed. Getting “visibility” into your supply chain doesn’t have to be difficult or costly. All that’s required to set it up is a carbon copy of the EDI data you already trade via FTP/AS2 – and there are no transaction fees regardless of volume!
Would you like to learn more about this technology for you or your clients (This is absolutely available for resale by EDI providers/consultants)? Just ask and we will set up a demonstration for you. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it