Supply Chain-Edi

Communication in Supply Chain

Organizations, today, maintain relationships with numerous other organizations as suppliers, customers, service providers, channel partners etc. and communication plays a pivotal role in growth and sustenance of any organization.

Organizations may be at any level of the supply chain and perhaps can be part of many supply chains, seamless and efficient information flow remains a challenge for all and slowly but surely organizations are realizing and waking up to impact of communication in this fast paced world.

Organization deal in number of products and most of the times, each product require number of raw materials which increases the complexity of the supply chain.

With the advent of ERP systems, organizations have been able to achieve seamless information flow within the organization but communication with external parties largely remains a grey area. This challenge is mainly due to different organizations using different legacy systems for their internal information needs.

Question that arises is whether it is possible to integrate the internal and external systems in such a way that it becomes easy to interact with partners and customers?

In other words, is it possible that we release purchase orders from our ERP systems and it is readily accepted by the legacy system of our supplier i.e. no need to manually feed the data in their legacy system from our POs? Similarly, is it possible that we receive invoice from the suppliers in their format and it is readily accepted by our ERP system?

The types and level of integration determines the extent to which data from customers and suppliers are visible and usable.

Standardization, exchanges of information and decisions and synergies will be byproduct of the integration between internal and external IT systems.

EDI: Electronic data interchange is a set of standards that collectively provide a common protocol or syntax for transacting business...