subject: Edi Services - Understand The Benefits Of This Technology [print this page] If you wish to improve business process efficiency and cost effective communication with your business partners, vendors and customers, then you need not look beyond EDI services.
This is a service that substitutes paper or document based transactions with electronic ones. The fact that it is done in a structured format understandable to all stake holders makes it an obvious and imperative choice.
The benefits can be explained as under.
-You no longer have to deploy personnel to take care of mundane and time consuming activities like inputting data pertaining to transactions, printing of documents, invoices and sending them to recipients through courier or mail. Not only are these activities a huge waste of manpower talent but they are also fraught with risk of human errors seeping in.
-When you have EDI services helping you out, you can make use of such manpower for other more challenging tasks. This will keep them motivated and they will not leave you due to the fact that they are not able to learn anything new working for you. The obvious result is that you gain from increased productivity, no errors and a motivated work force.
-In keeping with the trends today of reducing paper to the best extent possible, EDI services helps you achieve that due to absolutely no paper being used for any printing. The electronic dispatch of information also does away with the need to receive acknowledgements or follow up with the recipient when stuff is sent physically.
-No documents printed means that you do not have to make physical space for storage. You are thus able to use costly real estate space for something more productive. You also need not spend money on stationery. Information sent electronically is also very clear as compared to that sent through fax.
-The process of information retrieval is faster and less cumbersome since it is sent in a sequential manner and is numbered. Customers and other business partners will fancy doing business with you thanks to the ease of transactions and elimination of any errors that are more common with manual processes.
What about EDI services integration then?
If your business is a small or just growing one, then it is advisable to take the help of professional EDI service providers. They have trained manpower and have made the necessary investments in servers as well as other stuff necessary to offer this service to their customers.
Outsourcing this activity to such service providers would free your office resources to focus on your core business competencies.
As long as you can identify the appropriate EDI services provider with experience and good referrals, you need not worry about their efficiency.
They would be able to make available reports of performance and adherence to service level parameters as and when you want. That should be enough for you to run your business efficiently and move away from archaic manual processes.