5 Order Issues and How EDI Helps - Onramp Solutions

Author: Vincent Bull in: Business Solutions

5 Order Issues and How EDI Helps

November 14, 2022

Orders and customer communications have come a long way. From hand delivered notes, to mail, to phone calls, to faxes, to emails and websites. You are probably using one or more type of communication at your firm right now. You are likely:

  • Receiving customer orders via email, call, or fax
  • Moving reports, work orders, engineering documents, etc., between your business units by manually walking the paper copy to the relevant workstation
  • Placing your accounting documents on a shared online drive, like DropBox, SharePoint, etc., to share your financials with outside accountants
  • Using standard mail to send invoices and checks to your customers and vendors

These communication types all have one or more problems associated with them. Slowness, undecipherable writing, inefficient… Or the worst one of all: Human error.

With every communication type listed above, there is an issue that is fixed and/or created. At the end of the day, all of these order entry systems have issues that can affect your business. Issues like:

Bad Data

One of the key issues that comes from most of the previous systems are customer orders that are entered incorrectly, or with missing information. As discussed in the OnRamp white paper Better Data, allowing these errors to make their way through your system and all your various software packages is costing you time. And time is money.

How EDI Helps

EDI allows your customers a direct channel to your customer order entry system. A quick send from them and their data has been received. From there, your sales team can quickly contact the customer to confirm the order, if needed, or you can immediately convert the order to a sales order to start scheduling. In other words: With EDI, you remove any chance of an order entry error on your end, ensuring that your customer always gets exactly what they are asking for.

Entry Delays

Another common issue that arises from communication type is the time it takes to get the order into the system and that same data out to the relevant teams. This issue is often eased by the benefits of an ERP with a single-source database. However, even then, it can take time to get the right information into the right location that allows the right people to get to work sooner.

How EDI Helps

EDI puts all the data into the ERP system. This makes the data immediately available to all:

  • Your sales team no longer needs to waste time entering the order, thus getting back to the important job of making sales
  • Your planning and scheduling teams no longer have to wait to see an order
  • Your purchasers can see the schedule sooner, since it’s added sooner
  • Your shippers can forward documents as they are loading the order

In the end, your whole firm becomes more efficient because there is no wait or wasted time looking at or entering data.

Production Delays

As mentioned in the previous point, delays can be costly. And these delays can often have a snowballing effect. A delayed order can mean that your scheduling needs correcting or adding to. Urgent orders that are delayed can mean greater delays as the work center needed to complete the order is taken up with a different larger order that just can’t be moved in a cost-effective manner.

How EDI Helps

By adding EDI as a way to communicate directly with your ERP system, your planning team will have immediate knowledge of any upcoming order that requires scheduling changes. From here, they can quickly change the plan in a way that minimizes impact and maximizes productivity. And with the single-source database, your production team will know that a change is coming. In other words, your production team will always be able to check your scheduling tools like demand and capacity planning, finite scheduling, and procurement to ensure your orders are always on time.

Customer Communications

Communicating with your customers is a crucial part of your business. So, it should also be crucial that your customers get regular updates about their orders, including their status, estimated delivery date, and any pertinent documentation.

How EDI Helps

EDI allows you to share all information with relevant stakeholders immediately with efficient and timely replies directly to your customer from all channels, including: customer service answering a customer request, automatic shipping notifications sent to the customer, or an online customer portal. All this at no extra cost to you.

Shipment Disruptions

Most manufacturers are also customers. You know the pain that it can be to receive an unexpected shipment from one of your vendors. This can take the shape of a shipment that:

  • Is delivered early or late
  • Is missing parts or has too many
  • Doesn’t have the proper paperwork

How EDI Helps

A good ERP system will have a module in place that allows you to forward shipping notifications to your customers so they can avoid the above pain points. This means that with a single click, your shippers can create and print the documents that have to be attached to the shipment while sending copies of those documents and a notification to your customers so that they can be ready to receive their goods when they arrive.

Conclusion

EDI is a revolutionary technology that has been in use for a while and ensures accurate communication between business. With multiple standards and document types, your ERP system should come equipped with an EDI subsystem that can help ensure you, your vendors, and your customers are all receiving important information as quickly as possible.

With the help provided by EDI mentioned above, you will see that all of these benefits together will help you improve your firm and connect you with more opportunities and more wins. By improving every metric at your firm, a good ERP with EDI helps you to achieve your primary business objective – profitability.

OnRamp ERP is shipped with a built-in EDI communication system that will improve the way you talk with your customers, with your vendors, and with one another.

Agree/ Disagree? Tell us what you think below!

 

Authors

  • Vincent Bull

    Vincent Bull is the current VP of Sales and Marketing at On-Ramp Solutions Inc. On-Ramp provides comprehensive, flexible fully integrated ERP, MES software solutions to manufacturing and services based companies. He is seasoned in the interaction between software solutions and pairing that with helping human resources improve their abilities to increase their production capacity. Vincent has a passion as well for sports such as basketball and has long been a supporter of such initiatives as The Guelph Board of Approved Basketball Officials. He also has volunteered at Special Olympics Ontario, for a host of different sporting events. Vince is a graduate of Georgian College in Ontario, holding a degree in Computer Programming.

  • Paul Henriques

    Paul Henriques is the current Manager for the Documentation and Training team at OnRamp Solutions Inc. Paul has over 15 years of experience in writing training material and documentation for various software companies. Having had to learn OnRamp ERP to better document it’s features and write training material; Paul is constantly stunned by the amount of thought that goes into each feature and the capabilities that are within the program, with features for all the various business units of a manufactory. Paul spends most of his free time keeping up to date on all the latest news and best practices for the manufacturing sector. Paul’s favorite manufacturing quote: “There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.” – Henry Ford

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