How do you ever really know if you have reached the state of diminishing returns with EDI? For many of you, EDI was a project started years or even decades ago. Most likely, the individuals who embarked on the EDI project are long gone. More importantly, the impetus and needs that instigated the foray into EDI are all different today as well. At the time, you may have only needed to get a handful of Trading Partners connected electronically, and now you have 25, 50, or even 100 or more EDI Trading Partners. The EDI service provider you chose in the beginning, while well suited to implement and manage smaller and less complicated EDI requirements, is now the wrong company with the wrong service model for your EDI needs. How do you know? What do you do? Is there a better option? Will the cost and risk of switching to a more sophisticated and modern alternative offer significant improvement and cost savings?
In short: YES, YES, and YES!
The 5 Signs You Have Outgrown Your EDI Service Provider:
- Integration: You have still not fully integrated files from your systems with your EDI provider. You have pre-processes and post-processes you code, maintain, manage and troubleshoot. Sending and receiving electronic files in the format your EDI service provider needs versus the way you need limits or unnecessarily complicates your integration requirements. It also adds significant costs, strains and diverts your existing internal staff who must facilitate these outside processes.
- Support: Are you forced to interact with a Centralized Ticketing System or Help Desk with a revolving group of individuals being assigned to your issues? This method of support only benefits the provider. Typically, this is where trainees are placed to gain experience at your expense. With each incident, you find yourself re-educating the individual assigned to your problem with your processes and what has or has not been done previously. Good luck getting an efficient, speedy or economical outcome. You will meander through these inexperienced staff, waiting and hoping your problem gets escalated to an individual with more experience and knowledge. An escalation process could take hours, days, or even weeks, and does not serve you at all.
- Repetitive Problems: Repetitive daily, weekly or monthly errors that persist and always require your involvement.
The second promise of EDI, right behind integration, is minimizing errors. Repetitive errors are systemic for reacting to the symptoms and not fixing the problems. In an environment where every task comes with a cost the tendency is to ignore the underlying problem in favor of pushing the data through and hope it does not happen again. Over time, these problems grow in number and chargebacks become inevitable and the cost and commitment to correcting all these underlying problems becomes untenable. - Escalating Costs: If every interaction with your EDI Service provider becomes a chargeable line-item then there is no incentive to fix repetitive errors or seamlessly integrate your data. The more inefficient your process is, the more expensive it is to maintain- making it unlikely your costs are in line with the services, connectivity and support level you are receiving.
- Nuisance: EDI processes often become a nuisance. EDI no longer has the focus or priority of a dedicated skilled resource as it once did in your organization. EDI is managed or worked on only when it needs attention. There is also the inevitable situation where your EDI provider is more focused on new accounts or larger accounts and now you have become their nuisance. Either way, this is a path to failure.
The fact remains that if you have more than 20 trading partners and trade 3 or more electronic documents, you have outgrown 95% of the EDI service providers today. Worse, your costs are exorbitant when compared to the level of support and seamless integration you should be experiencing.
Quite honestly, seamless integration is no longer the promise or unachievable holy grail of EDI. Dedicated support, cost containment and problem resolution at the source are indeed priorities with a select few EDI Service providers today.
Click to experience how Promethean’s service model recognizes all these perilous pitfalls, provides 100% seamless integration, enables customers to budget monthly expenses, and provides direct contact with experienced resources assigned to your EDI processes.