Businesses across supply chain ecosystems employ Electronic Data Exchange (EDI) to securely map, translate, and exchange documents or files with their partners. Though it is much safer and faster than paper-based exchange methods, EDI introduces its own set of challenges.
Here are common EDI integration challenges encountered and addressed by entreprises with a modern EDI solution.
Challenge #1: Fragile Integration
Enterprises may build integrations that are not standardized. In case these custom integrations are co-dependent to support a specific process and are not well tested, the code becomes fragile. Back-end applications become tedious to migrate and do not respond well to updates, while changes become expensive to implement.
Solution: Standardized integration applications with connectors and APIs
The problem of brittleness and non-reliability can be solved with a modern EDI integration solution that can:
- Translate, map, and alter file formats from your enterprise applications to various EDI messaging standards automatically
- Carry out secure file transfer between trading partners
- Access testable, reusable components to turn integration less brittle and more reliable
Challenge #2: Lack of Expertise
Lack of expertise or ownership is one of the biggest challenges of EDI integration. For example, if a problem arises, like an erroneous value for a field, enterprises are often left without a precise path forward. Meanwhile, they might have orders piling up that can result in chargebacks, resulting in reducing profit margins. To address this growing challenge, expertise is required. Companies can deploy an in-house EDI specialist for understanding and troubleshooting while making adjustments. However, this does not prove to be an adequate solution for every company.
Solution: Look for a specialized EDI solution provider
Enterprise needs to function with a highly experienced integration partner to not only support the specifics of their product but also help them stay in touch with an integration team that can streamline integration. This can help companies save a great deal of money and time.
Challenge #3: Limited Integration Capability
Unanticipated issues arise more than often during an integration. Enterprises with conventional EDI integration capabilities are not fit to address these issues due to lack of flexibility and agility.
Solution: Agile and extensible EDI solution
With a flexible platform that provides aid to customizations, companies can make adjustments on-the-fly to handle issues specific to their business processes. Such modern, agile EDI integration solutions offer:
- Total control to customize integrations
- Flexible deployment options to meet customer requirements, thus helping companies increase customer delight and satisfaction.
- Cross-platform configuration for full-flexibility
- A developer API included with the platform
- Compatibility with all major databases and system disks to support enterprises as they scale
Challenge #4: Manual Processing
Conventional EDI solutions involve manual steps that are prone to errors. This negatively impacts not only the accuracy of the information but also the speed of processes such as purchase orders, packing, shipping, invoicing and other functions.
Solution: No-code EDI integration platform with monitoring mechanism
Modern EDI integration solutions with a no-code approach speed data entry and save costs from potential chargebacks. These enable companies complete their integrations using point-and-click setups, instead of custom coding. With a monitoring dashboard in place, modern EDI platforms also provide real-time visibility into all integrations and data exchange. Therefore, companies can verify whether data was correctly delivered or if there were any problems or errors.
In addition, these solutions save time by streamlining development, execution, and governance of integration flows across the entire business ecosystem.
Challenge #5: Prolong delays and huge overhead costs
Dealing with all these issues at the time they occur can cause unnecessary delays and elevate costs further. Consequently, business processes such as data exchange are deeply impacted.
This challenge can be eliminated with a pre-emptive integration solution.
Solution: Pre-emptive Integration Resolution
Pre-emptive effective integration solution can be deployed after careful evaluation to curb these challenges. It can handle issues in integration automatically and eliminate them beforehand without causing additional delay or money.
Explore Adeptia’s EDI integration solution and see how we can help tackle these challenges proactively for accelerating your data exchange for faster revenue realization. Get a demo today!