In last week's Remedi blog, Time Change...Time for Change...EDI Modernization, Brad Loetz outlined why companies are hesitant in making the investment in change that is needed when a company upgrades its current, traditional EDI software to the next generation of e-Commerce solutions that are available in the marketplace today. I would like to continue with that theme and expand on the points that Brad made while outlining why to make the change. For this blog, I am going to focus on the four points that Brad outlined as reasons to make the change.
While at IBM's InterConnect 2015 Conference a couple of weeks ago in Las Vegas, I was amazed at the amount of medium to enterprise sized businesses that I talked with that are still using a traditional EDI translation tool to support their EDI environments. These environments are critical to the success of the day to day business operations and are responsible for moving large amounts of data and dollars through their systems every day. I tried to help the people that I spoke with to understand that their are new flagship products, like IBM's Sterling B2B Integrator, that are much more than traditional EDI translation tools and can improve efficiencies and provide enhanced functionality while acting as a company's e-Commerce hub.
To summarize from Brad's last blog, these new e-Commerce solutions can provide enhanced business processes and workflows, data visibility, and business intelligence reporting than found in traditional EDI translation software. I have expanded upon Brad's four major reasons to make the change below:
- General upgrade in technology: Enhanced and extended transformation and B2B document mediation, processing flows and administration, integration adapters and functions, enhanced communications
- Reduce costs: Retire disparate applications with an integrated e-Commerce solution, improve efficiencies, automate processes and workflows, eliminate errors
- Improved functionality: Enhanced end to end data visibility, complete business process workflows, business intelligence reporting
- Simplify support for users and IT: One complete solution to support and maintain and not multiple disparate solutions, role based visibility for business and IT users, complete integration of applications and systems
Ready to find out more to see how making the move to an e-Commerce solution can benefit your company? Please feel free to give me a call to see how to modernize your company's current EDI environment with a complete, end to end e-Commerce solution.
