EDI transactions are the lifeblood of an organization: orders, invoices, shipping notices, inventory levels and other crucial information that keeps a business running smoothly.
But EDI is a black box for many businesses. Viewing EDI data requires a level of expertise most business-level users don’t have – so if they need to look at the source data for a particular transaction, they have to get in touch with an IT person. That’s not an ideal situation, especially as your organization grows and starts handling thousands of these transactions every day.
That’s why we’ve developed our EDI visibility tool – so your sales, AP/AR and other business-level users can get the information they need without having to pull IT resources from their regular duties.
Lacking EDI Visibility Causes Headaches – and Increases Costs
Why is it so important to be able to see EDI transactions in human-readable format? Because of what it can cost you if you can’t. One missed document can earn you a fine (or at least a negative mark) from your customer; frequent missed documents can add up to serious problems.
Your team will also have to pull IT staff from their regular workload to dig into the EDI data and help track things down. And they’re not the only employees who will lose part of their workday to this issue: every time a document gets missed or another problem crops up, your team will have to spend valuable time chasing down the data to figure out what happened. For example: if you receive an order for a quantity that doesn’t seem correct or a location that doesn’t match up, your business-level team can’t just pull up the EDI transaction to confirm the details.
Another example is a customer not acknowledging they received an invoice, or paying an incorrect amount against it. Without an easy way to see those EDI transactions, it’s much more difficult to confirm the invoice was sent, the customer received it, and it reflected the correct amount owed.
Finally, auditing your system is much more difficult if you can’t easily look at the original transactions. All of these issues add up to a less efficient, more frustrating and more costly process across your organization.
End-to-End EDI Visibility with Octolan’s EDI Visibility Solution
Giving business users access to EDI data throughout the entire cycle, along with the ability to translate that data so they can actually impact business rules, is crucial to improving your organization’s efficiency. With human-readable EDI data, your team can add items, pricing, safety stock for fast-moving items, and more – without having to get IT involved.
This is also important for dealing with customers. With our EDI tool’s proof of delivery component, you can combat things like late shipping notice-related retailer chargebacks. The EDI substructure stores the confirmation of your customer’s receipt of the document, along with what time they got it – which is a huge help to your accounts receivable department when they need to dispute that chargeback.
The Octolan EDI visibility tool is also translator-agnostic, working with whatever on-premise translator you’re currently using. Pulling in any and all data you’re able to collect, the tool quickly indexes and gives your business users access to critical information they need to do their jobs better and faster. And unlike most EDI translation tools, ours allows you to search by business data, so you can quickly find things like purchase orders your customer claims they sent but you didn’t see in your ERP.
The tool also uses a hybrid system of on-prem and cloud data – so our downloadable component can talk to your older system stored on your local server and pull it into modern cloud-based EDI storage, so your users can access your data from anywhere.
That means that you can extend the life of your current, older system with our tool and avoid costly re-implementation fees. And when you’re ready to migrate to a more modern, cloud-based system, the improved visibility and data indexing make the switch much easier to perform.
Want to learn more about how you can finally get full visibility into your EDI transactions with Octolan? Getting set up takes as little as 15 minutes, depending on your current tech environment – reach out today to get started.