Why small retailers are flocking to this EDI solution

Why is Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) so important to small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) and why is it quickly becoming a necessity? Electronic Data…

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Naomi Skinner

September 18, 20203 minutes read

Why is Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) so important to small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) and why is it quickly becoming a necessity?

Electronic Data Interchange or EDI is the most commonly used B2B ecommerce technology today. It simplifies and improves commerce between trading partners by automating or streamlining business processes, such as electronic procurement, automated receiving, electronic invoicing, and electronic payments.

EDI enables digital connectivity with trading partners and process automation of otherwise tedious manual tasks. As the past months have shown, COVID-19 has exponentially fueled this need for digital transformation and has been a wake-up call for any businesses thinking that they could continue business as usual without much technological advancement.

How digitization with EDI can benefit business

Small retail business owners were experiencing pressure to digitize their transactions long before the pandemic. The biggest challenge many non-digital businesses face is in performing day-to-day tasks such as processing orders, verifying inventory, and checking transaction status across several disconnected systems. By not having one centralized system, processes become manual, inefficient, and error-prone. When the pandemic hit, both large and small businesses suddenly needed to work remotely, often with fewer staff, and the need to automate many processes became paramount overnight.

There are many benefits that businesses realize by using EDI, such as reduced costs, improved data quality and visibility and, as it turns out, greater business resiliency, too. But for many small business owners, digital transformation and the adoption of an EDI solution has often been put on the back-burner because it was seen as too costly, required specialized knowledge to use, and in-house solutions seemed to work for the time being.

OpenText™ Freeway Cloud overcomes these common barriers of adoption by providing an affordable and easy-to-use way to simplify data exchange with many time-saving features. This solution was developed specifically for small to medium sized retailers, who just want to exchange and process transactions in an intuitive environment.

New features available to OpenText Freeway Cloud EDI solution

OpenText Freeway Cloud has been around for over two decades and continues to expand its any-to-any connectivity, supporting any message type using leading EDI standards, while still maintaining a single, simple to use interface. By joining OpenText with Freeway Cloud, you join a whole portfolio of B2B or B2A (business-to-anything) integration solutions that your larger retailers already know and trust.

Our development team has been continuously working on new features that allow you to quickly self-connect to a growing trading community and with internal integrations as well as new usage and activity reports. Here are some of the new features available on OpenText Freeway Cloud:

  • Self-service onboarding of trading partners: Customers have the option to self-connect to their trading partners, providing more control and faster turnaround for your growing digital community.
  • Additional certified trading partner connections: Customers continue to benefit from a growing trading partner portfolio and newly supported message types that support all major retail partners.
  • ERP integrations: Customers can now benefit from ERP integrations via AS2 and additional process automation.
  • New usage and activity reports: New reports provide transaction status details for inventory planning and sales forecasting.

Interested in learning more about how to simplify and automate retail without EDI skills? Watch this on-demand webinar or visit our OpenText Freeway Cloud webpage.

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Naomi Skinner

As Senior Manager, Product Marketing for OpenText Business Network, Naomi leads product marketing efforts for B2B integration in the supply chain space as well as in healthcare. Experienced marketer across various industries, Naomi enjoys translating complex concepts into simple terms.

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