How EDI makes trading faster

EDI is one example of a silent revolution. A technological change that enabled a massive shift in how organizations do business. The biggest benefit of using EDI, is the comparative increase in speed of transactions.

There are several stages where the EDI implementation will show benefits in speed:

Warehouse

An EDI warehouse system will monitor reorder levels, current stock, price, and automatically issue orders based on incoming electronic documents. There is no need for human intervention, other than to physically collect and dispatch the inventory. In current systems, there are multiple copies of orders that need several approvals. Now that approval is electronic and often instant.

Data entry

For a small business, the process of manually entering orders from one system to another is trivial. You might have a few at most each day. Now multiply that by the thousands and every single minute one order has a delay, the more you lose in productivity.

Payments

Another area where you will see an improvement in processing speed is for payments. Not only will you issue payments sooner, you will also receive payments faster. Again, the benefit compounds several times over and speeds up everything.

It is hard to overstate the improvement that EDI can bring to an organization. Literally everything happens faster, from the time an order comes in to when the goods board a ship bound for a destination.