Vendor Paperwork: Waiving the White Flag of Surrender

There comes a point in every retail and manufacturing company's evolution when dealing with the mountain for paperwork involved in vendor or supplier transactions becomes overwhelming. You can scale your ability to issue purchase orders, acknowledge advance shipping notices and process invoices with additional people temporarily. But any successful company knows better standards and automation have to be put in place to really grow.
An industry standard for transmitting data back and forth--including purchase orders, invoices and many more documents--is called Electronic Data Interchange or EDI. For those at larger retailers and manufacturers, this may be old hat. But for many, it's a huge eye opener into how you can work smarter, not harder. There are a few hurdles, however, in implementing EDI.
Setting up an EDI translator or doing EDI mapping for how you prefer to send and receive EDI transactions can be expensive and involve extensive IT resources. While some companies have the budget and staff for this, most don't. Many turn to EDI software providers such as Direct EDI. The Internet EDI or Web EDI industry has grown up around enabling retailers and manufacturers to exchange documents and complete transactions online, as a service. This means the creation and flow of purchase orders, advance shipping notices, invoices, etc. all happens in an EDI tool that connects buyers and vendors virtually. It becomes a very simple action to create standardized communication for both parties and have it excha

nged seamlessly.