The Inovis Blog

It’s safe to say that some people just don’t like change, regardless of how good that change may be for them. Take for instance a recent election in Bucharest, Romania. The residents of this Romanian village re-elected Neculai Ivascu to be their mayor. Although he had the experience of running the village for almost two decades, there was one problem in voting him in—Ivascu was deceased. Despite his passing from liver disease just after voting began, he still managed to win the election by a margin of 23 votes. One villager told local reporters, “I know he died, but I don’t want change.”

In the supply chain industry, one of the trends we’re seeing right now is small organizations being given all of these requirements by their large trading partners who have asked these small companies to use EDI with them and to use a particular website. With this request, the hub is just trying to get their trading partners to use electronic commerce. They don’t care if they use a particular method or website. What ends up happening, however, is that the small partners get caught in a jam because big customer number one wants to use x website, big customer number two wants to use y website, and so on. As a result of these different requests, mom and pop shops that don’t operate on big margins to begin with, are now in the position of having to support each and every one of their large customers in a different way. They’re going to a variety of websites, but ultimately, these websites are all doing the same thing.

The reality is that these big hubs don’t particularly care that you use a specific website. They just want to get the data into EDI and their logic is that by offering a particular website, they’re providing an economical option. The truth is that there’s a better way of doing things out there, but what so often happens is that individuals and companies get stuck in their way of doing things and don’t always have time to explore other options that might lead to better results. Another factor is that mandates from the hubs can be sometimes ominous and it might be hard to ask, “Hey, can I do this a different way?” Before you know it, you’re caught in this cycle of inefficiency where you can’t seem to find a way to get yourself out.

That’s where a lot of web-based solutions come to the rescue for many smaller companies. When a company services each one of their customers in a unique way and they’re using different websites and processes for each customer, the chance for error has been dramatically increased. Not because of carelessness or because the individuals performing business are error prone, but because efficiency can’t be established.

Standardizing on a solution like Inovis Webware enables you to have a single point of entry or a single portal where you can view and enter all of your electronic commerce transactions with all of your partners. You can train a specific resource, have a backup for that resource and have a consistent process across everything so that you’re able to enjoy the benefits of that routine and are able to stop some of the miscellaneous errors that occur because you’re handling every customer differently. You can also streamline your operations in your trading. It saves a lot of time and hassle because it’s a standardized product offering and it’s a standardized methodology-proving that change is often times a good thing!