How to succeed at EDI integration

Integrating your EDI with your ERP (or other systems) realizes many long-term benefits: saving time and money, increasing accuracy, and improving client relationships.

Once an EDI integration is set up, our solution will do most of the heavy lifting, eliminating many of the burdens from your in-house team. But to reap the benefits, we first need to build the correct integration; for that, we need detailed information that only our clients can provide.

Customization:

EDI integration is not a plug-and-play off-the-shelf solution. We customize the integration to your environment – the application(s) you use, your retailers and the transactions you exchange.

For us to do this, some upfront client effort is required. The upside – significant and ongoing – is that the success resulting from the integration more than justifies the preliminary work.

Communication to provide the right solution:

Because customization is vital to the integration, we need to know how your order management currently functions. To easily share that information with us, we provide our clients with a project-specific Discovery Document that lists all the questions we need answered before integration work can commence. 

The document outlines the business requirements, mapping, and cross-reference rules required for the integration to succeed. It includes questions about connectivity, target dates, processing and more. The answers are likely known to the client’s operations team and will form the basis of the custom integration architecture we develop. 

Methodology and structure:

Experience tells us that clear and precise information at the start sets projects up for success. With accurate information, we can avoid having to redo work – which almost certainly results in delays and possibly extra costs.

We start with a kick-off call that brings all the stakeholders together: The client team, ERP or IT consultants, any other third parties, and the Integral team. From that call, we can begin the discovery process. Discovery is an intensive and in-depth process, and it can take weeks to lay out the business processes and impacts on data integration. But the payoff is that information gleaned from discovery allows us to begin solution design, mapping, and project development. We then test our code, and the client validates that everything processes as required. At that point, we are ready to set a go-live date.

EDI integration is not a one-size-fits-all solution. We believe in learning what you need before customizing your integration. Our clients come to us for our specialized expertise, and we’d be doing them a disservice if we failed to execute a thorough discovery before beginning to work.

Our 37 years of experience ensure that you get EDI integration done the right way and tailored to your business by Integration Specialists. We believe you will be impressed with Integral’s methodology, our structured approach and our dedicated team.

We encourage you to talk with our Director of Sales, Lee Mrkonjic, to learn more about the EDI integration process.

You can contact Lee at –
lee@integralgroup.ca
(289) 301-2410