While the world is gradually shifting to a new normal, organizations haven’t traded pandemic uncertainty for confidence just yet. Shortages and delays in the global supply chain have impacted COVID recovery and will continue to affect the economy for the foreseeable future.
With limited access to resources and raw materials, increased labor shortages, and rapidly growing business costs due to inflation and other factors, businesses continue to face numerous challenges.
More than ever, organizations need better collaboration with supply chain partners to serve their customers and meet business goals.
Modern integration capabilities (such as APIs) combined with tried-and-true Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solutions can help businesses manage costs, maximize margins, minimize disruptions, accelerate business velocity, and identify areas where they can realize a competitive advantage, even during difficult times.
Let’s explore how a combined EDI and API integration approach can contribute.
For decades, EDI has worked well for large “hub” companies with their suppliers. However, with EDI, communication is still batched, the response time can be slow, and visibility into processes and transactions lags.
As organizations add a growing volume and variety of supply chain partners and exchange data more often, the limitations of EDI are evident. For example:
When EDI systems are disjointed and individualized, it’s difficult for manufacturers to forecast how much of a product to make, when, and for whom. As trading partner communities grow—better connected, more real-time integration is needed to get sufficient visibility.
Freight carriers need real-time shipment status updates to estimate per-trip revenues and maximize carriage space. Delays in communication can be problematic.
When transactions aren’t in real-time, retailers struggle to stay on top of inventory availability, stockouts and overstock. It impedes their ability to coordinate inventory as it’s purchased in real-time outside of stores.
The fast pace of digital transformation that occurred during the pandemic has helped make business communication more efficient. Along with this, expectations for real-time communication and collaboration in all areas of business have continued to escalate. This has accelerated the initiatives around combining Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and EDI.
APIs can complement and add to EDI functionality. They’re cloud-ready connections crafted with more flexibility than protocol-bound EDI. Leveraging APIs, systems can transfer information many times a day and get responses immediately. APIs can be a better fit for sending tracking time-sensitive data, quotes, or other data that requires immediate, real-time attention.
However, many companies lack the resources or know-how to build, manage, and support both EDI and API connections. That’s where a modern EDI Cloud and/or SaaS solution – and partner like us -come in.
To optimize their supply chains and get the most out of their software investments, organizations can leverage cloud EDI or SaaS EDI integration solutions with an experienced provider that can help deploy and manage EDI and APIs together.
The process of building, managing, and maintaining integration software is a technical undertaking that few organizations have the in-house expertise or bandwidth to handle.
Cloud or SaaS solutions make integrated EDI and API solutions accessible for any business. They can reap the benefits of state-of-the-art software without worrying about setup, maintenance, and ongoing management. This enables companies to use their resources more efficiently in a rapidly scaling B2B network environment.
With a SaaS approach to modern B2B data exchange, organizations benefit from:
Digital business networks based in the cloud—such as the IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network—utilize both EDI and API capabilities to streamline business communication and make data available on demand. And that flexibility comes with advantages, including:
Using EDI and APIs together enhances customer satisfaction and streamlines collaboration between partners and internal users. Communication and response times are faster and more agile. Together, EDI and API help to improve visibility and responsiveness.
Business Value of EDI/API Integrated Solutions for B2B Supply Chain Partners
Combining EDI and APIs is essential to modern businesses, and the right EDI SaaS solution can lead to better communication within your supply chain to encourage growth—even during a time plagued with post-pandemic supply, staffing, and inflation issues.
We help companies leverage the IBM Sterling Supply Chain Business Network to deliver frictionless connectivity between supply chain partners through a unified EDI/API system. With the ability to reliably communicate real-time data on-demand, supply chain partners can lower operational overhead, save time and money, and ultimately find new ways to grow.