Top-to-Bottom Process Coordination across EDI, ERP, and E-Commerce Platforms
Technology providers offer several software solutions designed to solve specific business problems. While comprehensive ERP systems that integrate all of an organization’s internal processes are very worthwhile investments and make a huge difference to productivity and bottom line, their specialized nature makes them ill-suited for managing external processes. Purpose-built solutions for interacting with customers, vendors, and suppliers are much better options for external supply chain coordination. Integrating upstream and downstream platforms “Upstream� supply chain communication with suppliers and other vendors typically fall under the purview of electronic data interchange (EDI) solutions, while promoting and selling goods and services to customers downstream is usually handled by e-commerce platforms. Each type of solution provides the best range of features for its designated function, and follows its own set of standards, so it makes perfect sense for organizations to have all three types of systems in place. However, using each of these business information systems in isolation will yield somewhat limited benefits. Your staff will still have to spend a considerable amount of time manually reconciling supplier orders with internal inventory, matching vendor purchase orders with accounting ledgers, sales reports with online customer transactions, and so on. With so many cross-platform interactions to manage each day, labor costs can skyrocket. Most successful organizations have turned to platform integration solutions to ease their operational workload and boost profitability. ERP: Your digital command center