- Table of contents
- 01 What is EDI
- 02 The Benefits of EDI
- 03 EDI components
- 04 Docura value offer
- 05 What is next
01 What is EDI¶
Electronic data interchange (EDI) is a computer-to-computer exchange of business documents in a standard digital format.
The main goal is the business process automation, that leads to:- cost reduction,
- increased productivity,
- increased reliability.
02 The Benefits of EDI¶
With a fully integrated EDI system, the exchange process involves no paper, no emails, no people, and almost no time. The benefits that businesses across all industries derive from using EDI are the following:
- Cost savings – EDI reduces the costs of personnel, supplies, and office and storage space.
- Partner requirements – many companies will no longer do business with you if you can’t do business electronically.
- Speed and accuracy – having no people involved speeds up the processing
- Business process standardization
At the end EDI helps to increase your business efficiency.
03 EDI components¶
- Computer to computer. EDI is intended to replace the manual input of data into web forms and emails. While email is also an electronic method, documents exchanged via email must still be handled by people rather than computers, while the main goal of EDI is to fully automate business exchange. Using an ERP or Web EDI is required.
- Business process to automate and workflow. What business process and how we want to automate.
- Purchase
- Sales
- Logistics
- Finance/Accounting
- E-commerce (sales and purchase)
- etc
- Document types. Set of business documents to exchange, according to selected business process (purchase, sales etc). The most common documents are: orders and invoices (both purchase and sales). But there are many others: purchase order confirmation, shipment order, financial statement, payment order etc.
- Document formats. As EDI documents are processed by computers, a standard format must be used so that computers could explicitly “understand” the documents. Examples of document standards:
- EDIFACT
- X12
- CSV/TXT (with separator, fixedlength)
- Peppol BIS
- ISO 20022 for banking transactions
- Docura native XML (Docura-Documents)
- Various XML and JSON formats
- Machine printed PDF (recognition)
- Transmission channels. EDI can be transmitted using any methodology agreed to by the sender and recipient, but Internet is most common. Standardized protocols are:
- API, REST-API, SOAP, ODATA (and other standards using HTTP protocol)
- Custom built POST, GET
- FTP, SFTP and FTPS
- Email (SMTP)
- AS2
- Local files exchange agent (Docudrive)
- Prepared integration packages. There are a lot of pre-built and ready to use integration packages for most common business processes (purchase, sales, logistics, finance/accounting), with various ERPS, including:
- SAP
- Axapta
- Business Central
- ERPLY
- ODOO
- etc
- Onboarding and mass connection
- Documentation / email templates
- Contacts management (calls, emails, meetings)
- Project management
- Setup and development
- Support
- Web EDI. Although considered not to be true EDI, Web portal can help:
- Onboard business partners fast (specially small ones)
- View and create business document online
- Send and receive requests to/from business partners
- Upload/download documents files
- Setup email notifications
- Manage internal codes business partners and addresses
- Manage product and price catalogues
- Online chat with Docuway support
04 Docura value offer¶
Docura (https://docura.net) is the best self service and cost effective internet based solution. We can automate any business processes and connect any partner. Examples of business process and sectors to automate:- Retail
- Retailers
- Suppliers
- Purchase
- Buyers
- Manufactures/Sellers
- Horeca
- Logistics
- 3PL providers: Incoming, Outgoing
- Transport organizations: paperless logistics
- Financial
- E-invoices
- Financial statements from banks
- Payments orders
- E-commerce
- Selling on market places
- Purchasing from warehouses, automated stock and assortment information
- Docura B2B ordering portal
- Docura PIM
Ask Docura specialists (info@docura.ee) how to automate selected business process and fulfill your business partner requirements.
05 What is next¶
Lets walk