Do you really need a 3rd party EDI Company or VAN (Value Added Network) to send and receive data such as POs, Acknowledgements, Ship Notices, Invoices, etc. to your retailers? With a very small number of exceptions, the answer is NO. Fortunately for these companies, suppliers are often painfully unaware of the alternatives available. In fact, there are 5 things a company making their living by being an EDI “middleman” will never tell you:
- You don’t need them to work with all retailers. There are a few exceptions, but many retailers work with technologies that allow for direct connection and communication with them – eliminating those data transfer and transmission charges.
- It does not cost an EDI company any money to send and receive your data over the Internet. As an example, consider how much it costs to stream data on one of your mobile devices. Not all that much, right? However, if you were to stream a movie on your mobile device at the cost of EDI transmission it would be about $240,000.
- EDI companies provide the slowest way to exchange information. Essentially it is a batch process, meaning that transactions are sent in bulk to retailers, instead of when a transaction actually occurs. As retailer expectations become higher and higher, some EDI companies are having difficulty meeting retailer timeframe compliance requirements.
- Current EDI technology has been around since the 1980s and is not keeping up with market driven needs such as real-time communication. To do this an Application Program Interface (API) is needed that enables no cost, real-time communication of transactions to occur.
- The use of traditional EDI services is largely a “black hole” restricting your ability to see and manage what’s going on inside and can impact your competitiveness.
To complicate matters, a retailer’s help line may very well point you to a specific EDI company that they work with when you are setting up with them, even though they have other alternative(s) available. It’s just a simple way to get you connected and it doesn’t cost them anything. As we said previously, suppliers are often painfully unaware of what alternatives are available.
The majority of retailers do have alternative connections available such as API, FTP or AS2 which allows you to communicate with them directly. These are the methods that OPAL employs whenever a retailer allows it, and OPAL does not charge for this data translation and transmission – after all it is the Internet.
Adapting to your specific business processes (not a one size fits all solution), as well as simplifying communication with your retailers, OPAL is the only autonomous drop ship and order fulfillment software solution in the market today. Check it out!