It is now increasingly common for traditional EDI vendors to become obsolete, as more and more businesses tend to adopt cloud EDI solutions. The main reason is that they cannot meet the demands of modern customers. But let’s look at the most common challenges that those still using legacy EDI technologies will face and why they should seriously consider moving to a cloud EDI solution.
The challenge of scalability
EDI can offer standardized data sets, but it is not necessary that the business’s digital system will be able to support them in their entirety. Depending on the industry, even the standard EDI requirements vary, which is a major problem for many customers. In short, out-of-date and on-premise solutions will be unable to scale to support all the data requirements necessary to participate in the existing ecosystem of the business as it evolves and expands.
The challenge of cost
Investing in an EDI solution is certainly an important decision. On the other hand, maintaining and sustaining outdated legacy EDI solutions entails increased costs over time. After all, when a company owns EDI software and hardware, it automatically needs to allocate resources, both financial and human, to manage them. And in the – not unlikely – event that something goes wrong, maintenance time and cost are added to the bill.
The challenge of automation
One of the most important advantages of modern cloud EDI solutions is the seamless integration with other systems and applications. The result is the automation of ordering or other EDI business processes. On the contrary, traditional EDI solutions are clearly inflexible and can only perform specific tasks, precisely because they cannot inherently integrate EDI with ERP and CRM in order to offer an end-to-end process. In response to that, businesses devote human and non-automated resources to resolve this problem, but the results are time-consuming and not as reliable.
The challenge of complexity
B2B and EDI integration can prove to be extremely complex and legacy EDI tools cannot keep up with the required changes, often resulting in errors. This will result in businesses facing a large number of problems that have a more general impact on their profitability and credibility. Cloud EDI can respond flexibly and reliably to these issues as well.
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