The B2B challenges today aren’t the same as they were a few years ago. The needs and wants of customers are constantly evolving, and the objective for today’s companies is not only limited to keeping up with those demands. As a matter of fact, they must prepare their EDI systems for whatever comes next. To do so, self-service integration plays a big role.
Self-service integration reimagines EDI systems and facilitates faster data exchange, thus enabling companies to address changing customers’ needs and deliver the value they’ve been promised sooner. But before understanding the importance of self-service integration, we must explore EDI systems and their significance in detail.
Let’s find out intricacies of EDI systems and the impact of self-service integration on these systems.
What is an EDI System?
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the electronic or computer-to-computer exchange of business documents between trading partners. An EDI system enables a company to send and receive data or information from another company electronically and in a standardized format, thereby accelerating data exchange and driving value.
Broadly speaking, an EDI system is a set of components that send and receive data between systems and then map that data to and from internal systems.
What Are Its Challenges?
When a company rely on traditional data integration methods to exchange documents or files, the entire onus of executing data-driven processes falls on the shoulders of IT. IT integrators take weeks or months of calendar time to onboard customers. Some more weeks go into performing subsequent data integration steps. Now, while IT executes these steps, business users wait to connect with customers.
When customers have to wait for so long to get connected with business users, they get frustrated and unhappy. It’s highly unlikely that these unhappy customers will invest in other products or services offered by the company, if not leave entirely. That inhibits revenue growth and increases business costs at the same time.
Self-service integration enables companies to reimagine their EDI capabilities and deliver value to customers on time.
How Can Self-service Integration Help?
Self-service integration enables non-technical business users to implement data connections and drive data exchanges – at the speed of business. While business users create business connections and drive EDI flows, IT can focus on other priority business projects.
Non-technical users can leverage pre-built application connectors, shared templates, dashboards, intuitive screens, AI-data mapping, etc. to implement connections and exchange data faster, improving the ease of doing business. Business users can leverage machine learning and security protocols to comprehend and define data semantics, and then make data connections following those data rules. Further, a single click is needed to retrieve, breakdown, and manage multi-dimensional, complex data and stream it in real time to execute modern-day business transactions. At the same time, IT is freed from writing complex custom codes and data mappings but continues to drive more high-value tasks.
When business users connect with customers in minutes, they can address their needs and wants and deliver on them. And because customers receive the promised value sooner, it becomes easier for companies to upsell these customers and ultimately create new revenue streams.
So, companies can rely on self-service integration solutions to supercharge EDI and meet the customers’ needs and wants without delay.