Saving Money Through EDI Integration

Exchanging transactions electronically has been a given for mid-sized businesses for a number of years. The advantages of using Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, are proven and easily quantifiable. With over 60% of printed invoices containing errors that can impact the bottom line in the form of chargebacks, mid-sized companies have come to demand the benefits of exchanging information electronically with trading partners. As mid-sized businesses have grown in sophistication, however, so have their needs for new business tools. According to a 2006 AMI Partners study over 23% of small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) indicated that they already deployed an ERP solution and over 31% indicated that they would deploy one in 2006. Adoption of these new technologies and applications, formerly the exclusive domain of very large enterprises, is creating new problems for the mid-sized business. As ERP systems are being purchased by a growing number of organizations with fewer than 500 employees and less than $1B in annual revenues, ensuring that EDI data is properly migrated to the ERP system is becoming increasingly mission-critical.

The result of this rapid adoption causes a two-fold problem: first is an increasing set of data silos and repositories – each critical to business needs and each out of sync with the other data repositories in the organization. Manually re-keying data from legacy or web-based EDI systems into newly deployed ERP software increases error rates and associated costs. Second – and equally critical – is an increased strain on limited IT resources during system implementations and data migration; setting up new ERP systems and migrating EDI data from legacy applications into the ERP systems can be challenging, frustrating and a severe strain on limited IT staff and budgets. In fact,transformation of data from legacy systems into new ones can consume as much as 60% of an integration project budget.