With EDI, your company can exchange documents electronically with your trading partners. Instead of sending a document to a person who has to enter data, e.g., in an ERP system manually, you can send the document directly to the recipient's system, where the data is automatically registered. That is, an electronic process replaces the manual process – hence the term Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).
You can, of course, also receive documents, which will be registered automatically in your ERP system.
EDI is typically used to exchange sales documents such as invoices, orders, and delivery notes. Still, you can also use it for more complicated and comprehensive documents such as product or product catalogs, freight booking – in short, all kinds of business documents.
EDI is a proven and stable technology that is continuously updated and used worldwide. That is because it has some undeniable benefits:
Another benefit of EDI is that the technology is based on standards. What this means, you can read about below.
An EDI solution retrieves the documents from a company's ERP system and sends them directly to the recipient's corresponding system. Several standard EDI formats exist in order to simplify the exchange between companies of different kinds and across borders. Here is a selection of the standards you may encounter:
There are several other standards, but the above are the most common ones.
When you exchange EDI documents with your trading partners, the automatic process is basically done in five steps.
All steps take place automatically, which saves a lot of time and minimizes the risk of errors.
Although the concept of EDI itself might be simple to understand, it is, in fact, a rather complicated technical process that lies behind. Therefore, you can advantageously use an EDI provider like, for example, Bizbrains.
In collaboration with your internal or external IT people, we take care of the technical details needed to extract data from your ERP system (or other systems) and deliver them to your customers and suppliers in the standard they use for electronic document exchange.
For example, you may want to exchange invoices automatically with your customers, but it may also be all sorts of other business documents.
For it all to run like a well-oiled machine, there must be a platform that can handle all the automated workflows and where you can maintain the overview of the documents flowing back and forth as they should. At Bizbrains, that machine is Link.
Many people choose Link in a cloud version so that they do not have to handle the document exchange daily, but it is also possible to install Link on your own servers.
If you choose the cloud solution, we make sure:
When you let us handle your EDI tasks, you do not risk your IT people getting held up every time you have to send or receive a document. Instead, you can lean back in the certainty that it will all run automatically – and that you will be notified in cases where your action is required.
EDI is our core competence. Simple as that. We have worked with EDI for many years and know all the details about the standards, be it PEPPOL, Easy Trade, EDIFACT, or something else, and we follow the development of the technology and standards closely. Therefore, we are able to deliver the following:
If you would like to know more about how you can get started with EDI yourself, please give us a call at +45 7070 1644.