Is EDI holding your company back?

Successful organisations are applying API and microservices to drive supply chain innovation.

Digital disruption is having a huge effect on every industry, but the changes are most notable in verticals like manufacturing, transportation logistics, and retail. As the number of trading partners expands, and B2B/EDI message ‘standards’ continue to diverge, organisations must spend much of their delivery capacity on “keeping on the lights” B2B/EDI messaging, rather than initiatives for future growth such as digital transformation. 

Yet, it is possible to innovate and differentiate, despite the constraints that B2B/EDI can impose. Successful organizations are applying API and microservices approaches to drive a ‘two-speed’ model that supports innovation.

Modern Supply Chain Management

Although organizations are driving towards delivering products to market more quickly, increasing agility, and streamlining business operations, EDI – the global standard for transmitting business processes and transactions, may be holding enterprises back.

However, replacing a legacy or custom point-to-point B2B/EDI solution carries increased risks and/or costs. Moreover, given its adoption and organizations’ investment in it, EDI isn’t disappearing in the near future. To succeed, companies must therefore find a way to marry new architectural approaches to B2B/EDI challenges that insulate the legacy technologies from new and abstract limitations. This can be achieved by applying API and micro-services approaches to drive a ‘two-speed’ innovation approach that supports innovation, even in the face of legacy B2B/EDI technologies.

The benefits of API-led connectivity, application networks, and B2B communication

A microservices approach to processing EDI documents, and reuse of business logic for processing exchanges between business processes creates business outcomes for the entire IT architecture, not just B2B communication. The idea is to create smaller, agile units for business, processes, and technology, and make those units reusable and available to the entire business while still maintaining stability and control.

Free-up I.T. Resources

Once you have your API strategy in place, the first corner of your application network is built out. Then, other groups or parts of your organisation are also doing the same thing. Every time they deliver a project they might add one or two or maybe three new resources to the application network. These assets can then be discovered and consumed by a broader set of people inside the organisation. Suddenly, instead of delivering projects, I.T. is actually directing projects. They are ensuring quality and reusability; they are thinking about important things like security and are now not needed for every single project.

Simplify integration with an Autonomous Supply Chain

Read the Whitepaper: Modern Supply Chain Management

Find out more

EDI is a standard messaging protocol, but one which can hamper innovation and agility due to its unwieldy
nature. But given the right enterprise architecture, it can be an important ingredient in creating positive
business outcomes. Our approach to abstracting away the complexity of EDI through API-led connectivity
has been shown to lower operating costs, open up new channels, and streamline business processes,
making digital transformation a reality for businesses in transportation logistics, retail, and manufacturing.
Contact us to find out how API-led connectivity can enact digital transformation in your business.