As a supplier, there is a good chance that at some point you will receive a request from a customer to handle orders in a web portal where you log in to see what the order or delivery schedule contains. In the same portal, you send back an order response, notify when the goods are shipped, and send the invoice.
From the large customer’s perspective, it provides enormous benefits through efficiency as they receive all business communication in a unified manner directly into their business system. This reduces monotonous tasks and minimizes the risk of “input errors” while rationalizing a significant portion of administrative tasks. The large customer often has hundreds of suppliers, resulting in large quantities of orders, order responses, and invoices that need to be handled in a rational manner.
Integration or not
The absolute best scenario is if the communication goes directly between the customer’s and the supplier’s business systems instead of passing through a web portal. This is usually fully possible, but a quick solution often used is a web portal to enable as many suppliers as possible, even those who have not sufficiently digitized, to communicate with the customer through EDI. As a next step, you as a supplier can choose to integrate EDI with your business system.
If your business system lacks the necessary preparations or you find it costly to adapt for EDI communication, you can use Viaduct’s solution Edionet™, where all your EDI customers are managed in an overviewable web portal. This way, you can avoid the need to log into multiple customer-specific portals with various logins and interfaces. All business documents are thus handled and stored in the same service for easier management of the order flow and export of history, etc.
Automatic packing instructions and shipment flags
Do you also need packing? Edionet™ supports automatic packing instructions. Some customers today require that all deliveries be packed uniformly, in the right size, and with the correct number of items in each box, etc. In addition, Edionet™ also supports the printing of customer-specific shipment flags.
Contact us and we will explain how you can get started most easily – and support you throughout the entire process!