ERP and EDI June 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Melton in EDI, Inovis Solutions, News, Technology.Tags: Accounting Software, EDI, ERP, inovis, SAP
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We recently sponsored an informative white paper called “Integrating EDI into Accounting and ERP Systems” written by our friends at Vantage Point & Associates. It rehashed some old yet great points as it discussed the alliance between EDI and ERP/Accounting Systems. This relationship is the very nature of EDI. Can your accounting system talk to my accounting system in a universal language?
The white paper discusses a historical timeline of EDI and ends with present time and “EDI Thrives Once Again.” I believe our own Bill Chessman covered this with his EDI is Dead (Long Live EDI) post. EDI is far from dead, and it does continue to thrive not only in the regular software environment but also in outsourced services offerings. This growth and sustainability is possible partially due to the increasing complexity of ERP systems and the necessity for Company A to pull information out of their ERP to produce a purchase order and for Company B to take this purchase order, pull it into their own ERP and produce an invoice and an Advanced Shipping Notice. As long as this handoff is necessary, EDI will continue to flourish.
Image Source: http://help.translab.ch/images/maenchen/handoff.gif
Integrating EDI with your accounting software will not only save you precious time, it will save you headaches and money. Automating this process will make working with your trading partners much easier, reduce the amount of paper wasted by your organization as you move away from faxes and lower the chance of errors as the data is not handled as many times as a manual process. This integration is possible through maps linking the data in the backend ERP with the standard EDI format.
Just as there are many EDI vendors out there, there are many ERP vendors. Sage, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Epicor, Intuit, etc. Each of these is capable of integrating with EDI fairly easily. Some EDI solutions have established relationships with particular ERP vendors to strengthen the bond through certification, like Inovis has done with SAP and our TrustedLink solutions.
The bottom line is the relationship between EDI and ERP systems is crucial to the sustained viability of companies from all walks of life involved in the buying and selling of goods. We assume most readers of this blog are Inovis customers, so what ERP do you use and which translator?
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We actually use True Commerce for our EDI solution, with a single exception for Inovis who does our packing slip for Federated. True Commerce integrated well with Quickbooks (our temporary solution for this one aspect of our business) but does have translators for MAS90, our main system which we will eventually integrate as well.
We also have a custom ERP/CRM system that doesn’t interface with anything!!! Someday we hope to get more control over it and integrate it as well, but these types of systems seem to be in a perpetual cycle of being completely frozen in time or in complete upheaval during rewrite attempts.
I think at this point, for small/medium vendors, it only makes sense to “accept” EDI requirements from the big players if you can offset your EDI cost (time, complexity, monthly fees, usage fees, etc.) with a win on the data entry side for accounting documents. Smaller companies have only really recently been able to implement EDI effectively through the efforts of EDI companies like Inovis giving people hosted services…before that, the complexity was just too high for a smaller company to implement.
I can’t imagine a small company having to not only conform to new physical and data requirements of EDI but also to have to hand enter or use some other manual process to get the data into their accounting software (or into their EDI solution, depending on order) and still manage to stay afloat! Integration is everything for the smaller company dealing in EDI.
Good points Will. It is true, in the past, small companies could not afford a large scale EDI software package – from not only a straight cost perspective but also the additional headcount to run an EDI shop in-house. Not only have VAN costs dropped to a more affordable rate, but there are new alternatives on the market. Not only are there easy to use SaaS versions available through protected web forms, there are also lower end software solutions that will keep you connected with your trading partners in a more affordable fashion.