Before Dustin started using Link as their EDI management platform, they mainly used formats that were especially tailored each partner. Everything was specially developed and adapted to each customer and
supplier that Dustin exchanged data with. This made the solution both expensive and difficult to maintain. In addition, the EDI people would often have to involve other departments in identifying any errors in the company’s transactions. In order to become more efficient and create more value when working with EDI, Dustin decided to invest in Link.
“With Link we’ve got an EDI management platform, which is very easy to work with,” says Henrik Schytte, who is Business Integrations Manager at Dustin. “We use Link to send and receive orders, order confirmations, despatch advices, and invoices, and we plan to use the platform for even more document types.”
Instant access to valuable information
“The great advantage of Link is that we have instant access to all information about every single document we’ve sent or received,” continues Henrik Schytte. “We are able to see when the document was sent and whether it contained the correct information. It’s crucial for us that we can determine if the information we send to our partners is also what they actually receive. In Link we can see both our own in-house format and the recipient’s format, and this is very valuable to us.”
Quick troubleshooting
“The simple access to information in Link means, among other things, that we can quickly troubleshoot issues. Even with limited technical abilities, everyone is still able to find out what documents were sent and received at what time and what the content of those documents was. This results in a quicker response and is highly valued both internally and by our business partners.“
Our work must provide value
Everything that Dustin does is based on a strategic decision that the company’s employees must create as much value as possible. Henrik Schytte elaborates on what this means for the work in the company’s EDI department: “Our employees don’t have to waste their time entering information manually. With Link they can spend their resources on something more productive instead and thus provide the company with more value.”
All troubleshooting starts in Link
Out of Dustin’s around 1500 employees, approx. 20 of them are using Link in one way or the other. About half of these 20 employees use Link on a daily basis to provide support or troubleshoot issues. Henrik Schytte explains:
“For example, if one of our suppliers contact us because they have not received an order, we always start by looking in Link to see if the order was sent at all. If we can see that the order has been sent, the error most likely occurred somewhere in the supplier’s systems. However, if the order hasn’t been sent, we need to find and correct the error. Perhaps we forgot to fill out a field, which caused the transaction to fail. Regardless the type of error, Link will tell us what’s wrong, so that we can fix the error and resend the document.”
We are constantly improving our work with EDI
“We are incredibly excited about Link and the collaboration with Bizbrains, who develops the platform. They are always very responsive to our requests, and together we make sure that we can improve our work with EDI in a way that adds value to us,” concludes Henrik Schytte.