In business, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) refers to computers exchanging documents with one another, with these documents staying in a standardized electronic format when they pass between business partners. This formatting standardization helps business-to-business (B2B) organizations facilitate transactions and exchange information with greater ease and accuracy. Complying with EDI is crucial to establishing better relationships with your trading partners and increasing your financial opportunities. If you want to streamline various business processes and meet trading partner and customer expectations, you need to know how to comply with EDI.

If you're interested in properly implementing and using EDI at your company, find out more about EDI compliance, its importance and how to become EDI compliant.

What Is EDI Compliance?

EDI compliance refers to an organization's ability to exchange its business documents in a manner meeting its trading partner's requirements. When a company complies with EDI, they'll facilitate the accurate exchange of business documents and data from one system to another.

Why Do Businesses Need to Be EDI Compliant?

Since businesses and vendors need to accurately exchange documents and data to operate effectively, EDI compliance is critical. Essentially, EDI is a way to set universal standards for every company to follow. Without these standards, companies could have different protocols and codes than their trading partners, leading to increased inefficiency and mistakes. If companies didn't utilize EDI, they'd have to spend time deciphering their partners' codes, or they could provide the wrong service or product due to a misunderstanding about what a code meant. 

Complying with EDI allows you to eliminate the inefficient and inaccurate nature of using different codes and protocols during document and data exchange. When you comply with EDI standards while you transmit data, you greatly reduce the risks of miscommunication and complications. By using EDI-compliant software and codes, you can ensure your business partners receive accurate data in an easy-to-read format.

Top Advantages of EDI Compliance 

If you're still wondering about the importance of EDI compliance, you'll likely want to know more about the primary benefits it offers. Some of the main advantages include better client and trading partner relationships, increased financial opportunities and improved operational efficiency.

1. Better Client and Trading Partner Relationships

One of the biggest reasons to follow EDI compliant requirements is the ability to improve your relationships with clients and trading partners. When your company uses EDI properly, you can easily communicate with your business partners. For example, you can quickly send your partner information about various tasks and update them on processes via pending payment statuses, invoices, shipping statuses and purchase orders. This accurate and fast exchange of information makes it easier for you to meet partners' expectations and for them to meet yours.

Another way EDI compliance helps you form a better relationship with trading partners is by its ability to allow you to respond to market changes quickly. When a market change occurs, EDI allows you to update trading partners fast and ensure they're on the same page as you. By having the ability to quickly adjust to the market, you can streamline your operations and reduce the chance of order disruptions. 

Along with EDI compliance's ability to improve trading partner relationships, it also can help you form better relationships with customers. Since you can respond fast to market changes, you can ensure customers always have the products and services they want. EDI compliance also allows you to improve customer service by increasing order accuracy and having more information to share with customers. This increased order accuracy helps products arrive at a customer's door faster and makes sure customers receive what they originally ordered.

2. Lower Risk of Financial Penalities

EDI compliance can also help you to better control your costs and reduce your overall expenses. For example, when a company fails to comply with its trading partner's EDI requirements, it can face EDI chargebacks. These chargebacks are issued by trading partners when a vendor's noncompliance results in extra expenses and disrupts their operations. Companies have different chargeback requirements, but any vendor should be aware that violations could range anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars.

Chargebacks can add up quickly, lowering a vendor's profitability. By meeting EDI compliance standards with your trading partners, you can significantly lower your potential costs. Since EDI compliance ensures you meet your trading partners' requirements, you can save a significant amount of money and potentially increase your profitability.

3. Improved Operational Efficiency and Accuracy 

When a company follows EDI compliant requirements, it can improve the efficiency of its operations by automating many important processes. Automating EDI transaction exchanges and other processes can free up your company's time, allowing you to devote your staff to other tasks. This level of operational efficiency also helps you fulfill a customer's order faster and more quickly communicate with your business partners.

EDI implementation also allows you to reduce your paper-based operations and switch to electronic documents instead. By switching to electronic documents, you can significantly lower the time it takes to send, process and fill out documents. Besides increasing efficiency, electronic documents improve your operational accuracy. EDI transaction sets have features built into them that reduce the need for manual data input and protect against errors in primary functions like data tracking, payment processing and returns processing.

Another operational advantage of EDI compliance is its ability to give you greater visibility over your supply chain and inventory. During the order fulfillment stage,  you can use this visibility to process orders faster. EDI also provides you with more data about your orders, giving you the ability to make more informed decisions based on supply chain, order and inventory data. With this data, you can also gain more information about market conditions to help you beat your competition.

4. Increased Financial Opportunities

Since many major companies require vendors to use EDI software to do business with them, EDI compliance opens the door for greater financial opportunities. You'll have the chance to sell your products and services on a larger stage, potentially increasing profitability.

In addition to increasing new business opportunities, you can also use EDI to significantly reduce material costs. Due to EDI's digital nature, you won't have to pay for as many transit, ink, envelope, postage and paper costs. Besides the direct material costs, you can reduce administrative expenses associated with investing in filing cabinets and paying staff to file, retrieve and prepare paper documents. Switching to an electronic format also cuts down on wait times, increasing your ability to process more orders every day.

EDI compliance comes with labor cost savings as well. Since you can automate many tasks that were once manual, such as filing, reviewing documents or entering data into forms, you free up your team to do more profitable tasks. Additionally, automation of data entry and other processes reduces the risk of human error and the costs that come from them.

How to Become EDI Compliant

With all of the benefits of becoming EDI compliant, you might be interested in EDI integration at your company. As you attempt to comply with EDI, you will want to begin by working with an EDI provider and then take the time to understand the needs of your trading partners. Finally, you'll want to test your EDI solution before bringing it out into the real world.

Work With an EDI provider

Rather than hiring an internal IT team to handle EDI processes, you can turn to an EDI provider. A high-quality EDI provider will handle all of your EDI needs for you, providing a software solution that meets various compliance standards. An EDI provider can also help with:

• Standards maintenance.
• Integration with your ERP application.
• EDI mapping.
• TXT/CSV/XML translation.
• Sending and receiving documents.
• Trading partner configuration.

All of this assistance can ensure you meet EDI compliance requirements. 

Understand the Needs of Your Trading Partner

With an EDI provider and solution in your corner, the next step is to understand your trading partners' needs. One of the first ways to better understand your partners is to find out what documents they'll need from you and what documents they'll be sending. You can also review their required communication protocols, EDI standards and other document specifications. By ensuring you're on the same page as your trading partners, you can improve relationships and better comply with their standards.

Test Your EDI Solution

Before you begin using EDI, it's important to test your EDI solution to ensure it works appropriately. In this testing stage, you'll check if your EDI solution can properly exchange business documents in the right format with your trading partners. Once you have verified that everything is running smoothly, you will be EDI compliant and ready to start working with trading partners and customers.

Common EDI Issues That ConnectPointz Solves

At ConnectPointz, we provide a variety of EDI software solutions to help you become EDI capable and meet compliance standards. With our EDI resources in your corner, you can solve many common EDI issues that come from trying to handle EDI needs in-house or from using ineffective EDI software:

• Reduce time to connect with new trading partners: It can take weeks to months to connect with new trading partners due to the time it takes to meet their requirements. With ConnectPointz, we make it easy for you to quickly add new trading partners. Since we automate many processes and help you quickly adjust to a partner's requirements, you can connect with new partners in as little as a few hours.
• Avoid processing delays: If you struggle to handle the various EDI compliant requirements for processing transactions and other tasks, ConnectPointz can help. Our EDI solutions make compliance easy and help you process orders and perform other tasks faster. When disputes come up, our platform gives you the opportunity to quickly see all of your EDI transactions and documents. Due to this greater visibility, you can respond to disputes fast and reduce delays in processing them.
• Eliminate EDI errors: When you handle EDI in-house, it can end up costing you money and clients due to human error. With the ConnectPointz platform, however, you can automate many processes and eliminate the need for manual data entry. As a result, you'll be at a much lower risk for EDI errors.
• Lower need for manual EDI maintenance: If you have to devote staff to EDI maintenance tasks for your in-house solution, you can end up with less effective results that cost you money and restrict your staff's time. Since we maintain our EDI software solutions, you won't have to worry about devoting resources and employees to EDI maintenance. 
• Remove ineffective EDI testing: Having an in-house team conduct EDI testing and confirm that your solution works can lead to inaccurate results, potentially leading you to use an ineffective solution. Our platform removes this risk by giving you highly tested tools known for their effectiveness and compliance with regulations.

Why Choose ConnectPointz?

At ConnectPointz, we're dedicated to helping you achieve EDI compliance in logistics, shipping and integration. One of the primary reasons many companies turn to our platform is its in-line compliance validation. This feature of our software means you'll always meet EDI standards. By utilizing our in-line compliance validation, you can eliminate operational disruptions and financial penalties arising from noncompliance.

In addition to providing in-line compliance validation, our software also helps your company reduce manual and repetitive tasks. With our end-to-end automation, you can completely remove the need for manual input for various processes and devote your staff to other tasks. Additionally, you can use our platform to more quickly and accurately transmit data and documents between your trading partners, reducing the risk of misunderstandings and helping you streamline communication.

Since we're invested in our client's growth, we've made it simple for our software to scale up as your business grows. When you're ready to add more connectors to your business, you can easily purchase and integrate them at a cost-effective price point. Our central portal also assists with improving collaboration across your team and increasing organization, as everyone will work off the same data and easily find information about different clients or processes.

Simplify EDI Integration With ConnectPointz

If you're interested in harnessing EDI solutions to better comply with EDI and streamline your solutions, turn to ConnectPointz. Get in touch with us to find out more about how our solutions can help you increase EDI compliance, reduce errors and positively impact your vendor relations. You can also review our many EDI-compliant solutions or complete our registration form to receive a free demo.