Weathering the storm: Recession-proof with EDI + API

In January 2023, Crisp announced its acquisition of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) platform Integral Group. Here, our new EDI team discusses how automated order management can be a cost-saving initiative, helping organizations weather challenging economic times.

With looming economic uncertainty, we have already seen many companies tightening their belts. This often means paring back on an already lean workforce, with the unintended consequence of costly errors, delays, lack of availability and dissatisfied customers.

While we’d never suggest that there is one magic wand answer to dealing with a recession, Integral’s EDI outsourcing service offers some meaningful help. EDI is an automated order management process that integrates with your current business applications. EDI has proven to be a solid recession-proof solution.

Doing EDI with Integral is an easy way to get some significant wins:

• Realize immediate savings
• Managing expenses
• Increasing efficiencies to lower costs
• Stabilizing labour costs
• Landing and retaining customers

Realize immediate savings

If you have more than one EDI provider, consolidating all your EDI processing with Integral means saving money right away.

Customers are often instructed to have multiple portals, systems, and service providers. They are told that there is a requirement to have separate retailer-specific solutions. None of that is true.

With overlapping services, you deal with many contacts for support and billing. You must ensure your staff is trained on every platform. This adds complexity to your environment. It’s costly, non-productive, and inefficient.

Consolidate and let Integral Group take responsibility for all your order management processing; you get a single point of contact and a cost-effective order management system.

Managing expenses

You are paying too much if you are dealing with large corporate EDI providers. Switching to Integral means lower monthly costs. With our EDI outsourcing model, there is no software or hardware to purchase and no long-term commitment. Integral’s flat rate pricing affords you EDI automation at a fair and predictable monthly cost. Moreover, you have our expert support team at your disposal, eliminating the need for expensive in-house technical expertise.

Increasing efficiencies to lower costs

Outsourcing your EDI automation to Integral means the end of the time-consuming manual process of copying data between applications. The outcome is fast, accurate transmission of critical documents like purchase orders and invoices. EDI also eliminates the financial burden of chargebacks due to human error. This results in consistency, which builds trust in customer relationships.

Stabilizing labour costs

With EDI automation taking care of repetitive tasks, your staff can focus on high-value work that significantly impacts your organization. Once you have integrated document processing, you also benefit from the ease of scalability – more orders to
process do not require additional staff, and fewer orders do not necessarily mean layoffs.

Landing and retaining customers

In many industries – large retailers being a prime example – doing EDI is not just a nice to have; if your growth plan includes these lucrative accounts, you need to be EDI compliant even to be considered for supplier status. With EDI, your customers benefit from a streamlined exchange of critical information that is dependable, timely and accurate. Integrated EDI automation offers operational visibility and control from front-office accounting to warehouse inventory levels.

Adding our API integration into the mix – which you can read more about here – provides real-time application communication. APIs are used for your eCommerce shops and more and propel your automation savings even further.

As we all brace ourselves to face a challenging economy, ensuring that you have a stable EDI platform supporting your business makes sense. With EDI integration in place, you will see positive impacts across the breadth of your operation – from finance and staffing to your customers.

Integral Group has been our customers’ trusted partner for EDI compliance, application integration, and API connections throughout the supply chain for over three decades. We’ve helped companies weather many uncertain times. Our EDI and API solutions today are stronger and more comprehensive than ever.

If you’d like to find out how we can help recession-proof your business, please get in touch with Lee Mrkonjic, our Director of Sales.

Direct: (289) 301-2410
Mobile: (647) 377-0131
lee@integralgroup.ca