EDI and ERP: 3 Keys to Automated Integration Without Customization

Technology and business process automation are increasingly becoming strategic components of success for today's digital economy.  Whether you're a manufacturer, distributor, retailer, 3PL, or in the CPG, automotive or food industries, your competitiveness is often tied to two critical business applications responsible for managing your business, ERP and EDI.  Successful implementations of these two key technologies can drive costs out of your supply chain execution and improve key metrics such as revenue per employee and cost per business transaction.

ERP systems handle finances, inventory, manufacturing and the business execution aspects of your operations. Your EDI system handles electronic interactions (transactions) with your supply chain (trading partners) including customers, suppliers, logistics organizations, banks and more.

With regard to handling the supply chain, ERP creates, receives, and manages these business transactions, while EDI transforms and communicates these transactions and instructions to and from your supply chain partners. ERP and EDI must be connected to achieve the maximum efficiencies of each. With a tightly integrated supply chain, integrated EDI will reduce labor costs and expensive errors as well.

Clearly these two systems should be connected, but the truth is that most companies are connected poorly or not connected at all. The principal challenge in integration is that while the information these systems handle (products, prices, delivery, etc.) is the same, the ERP context and format of the data used varies greatly between systems (partners) and is very different from the data in your ERP system. This means the data must be cross-referenced, validated, and formatted precisely to create accurate business transactions in your ERP system and in the ERP systems of your partners.

The transaction integration gap is often solved by modifying the ERP to manage the transactions received and sent by EDI.  Common ...