EDI (Electronic Data Exchange) is an industry-standard messaging protocol used in the transportation logistics industry that governs the computer-to-computer exchange of data in a standard electronic format between business partners.
First introduced in 1960s with the aim of accelerating the movement of shipping as well as transportation documents, EDI has widened its reach from enabling the electronic exchange of acknowledgements, purchase orders, to invoices etc.
Nevertheless, EDI is also difficult to work with. This is because this technology has aged over time. Moreover, EDI fails to stay harmonious with new-age technologies such as SaaS and mobile applications.
Yet enterprises in the transportation industry require integration and modern B2B collaboration, especially when they make significant efforts to compete for increasing supply chain efficiency, alleviating non-production, supplying chain costs, and optimizing delivery processes.
Need for B2B Collaboration
Business to Business collaboration, an important segment of modern business enables information flows throughout business relationships and supply chain. Both B2B collaboration and B2B Networks must ensure frictionless, productive, scalable and compliant transactions and data exchange. B2B transactions power supply chain and allow companies to meet the ever-changing customer demands and expectations.
Conventional EDI methods fail to offer efficient B2B collaboration, and thus productivity suffers. Developers and IT squads need to modernize legacy EDI systems to keep pace with changes in business environment including:
- Increasing B2B complexity
- Growing supplier and partner networks
- Accelerating the velocity of data
- Increasing compliance requirements
- Increasing security requirements
- Changing standards and message types
Modern Integration solutions enable B2B collaboration across various entities of transport ecosystems including, multiple systems, end-consumers, and trading partners. Integration platforms allow businesses to overcome the increasing pace of change in the world of the supply chain and its supporting logistics networks.
Further, integration systems enable companies to make quick and easy connections with any partner for beginning the flow of digital information that supports all kinds of B2B processes, relationships as well as transactions.
Additionally, it drives any-to-any connectivity and allows enterprises to form collaborative and productive B2B relationships. Such solutions also enable partners to find answer of most burning questions, identify and resolve disruptions and threats.
To summarize, integration smoothens B2B collaboration, reduces B2B complexity, automates processes, optimizes customer experience, alleviates overhead costs and more, all with less burden on IT resource.
Creating a New Transportation Model with B2B Integration
Businesses employ integration solutions to streamline B2B collaboration that drives agility and value
B2B integration platforms help enterprises respond to the change happening in the world of transportation. Integration solutions enable B2B collaboration and allow customers to give customers a world-class level of performance in their transportation and logistics management, without investing a lot of time, effort, and resource.
Introducing integration platforms in the business fasten customer-decision regarding freight and transportation spend. Decisions may include allowing real-time execution, analyzing networks, or picking between available business opportunities in the supply chain. Hence, the operational efficiency and performance are optimized.
One of the most important benefits of B2B integration is that it helps companies to onboard customers and suppliers into their digital ecosystem up to 80% faster. This directly lowers the cost incurred by the customer, which drives value proposition of making mid-market customers successful and satisfied. By simplifying the onboarding process and making it efficient than ever before, transport companies can shorten their time-to-revenue to boot.
In addition, B2B integration solution increases security and assures streamlined file delivery by offering real-time visibility, governance, and control over all transactional data. Further, it also allows companies to create a collaborative community experience by digitally connecting with partners, creating an enriched transportation ecosystem.
Finally, a B2B integration platform reduces costs and creates a new business model for transportation companies. For quite long, mid-market has suffered only because of the incapability of providers to scale their costs. Integration solutions help to scale the cost infrastructure down to a great extent, serving marketplace even better.
To gain more insights, go through what Adeptia’s integration platform has to offer.