EDI 101
How familiar are you with the acronym EDI? It stands for “electronic data interchange”. Do you know how it can be applied to your business?
Put it this way, if you are making money doing business you need to be communicating with other people or companies in this world (unless you are working in a complete silo). Thus, you are surely creating or exchanging some types of business documents. For example, you receive Purchase Orders from your customers and return Invoices that you create and submit back to them in order to get paid for the services or product you supply. All those documents you create and exchange using Excel, Word, PDF, email, or any other method can be recreated using EDI.
Now, you ask, how can it be applied and what are the benefits? Working at Meade Willis, an EDI and supply-chain software company that was an early adopter of EDI, we have had many people from small to enterprise-level organizations ask us the same question. Whether you are just starting your journey to digitize some key processes or come from a mega corporation – don’t be hesitant to ask questions. It is surprising that even though EDI was first adopted by companies in the late 1960s, some companies still have no idea what EDI brings to the table. A fun fact here, I recently visited a multi-million-dollar company in Bolivia to discuss how they can adopt and benefit from EDI practices within their supply chain. They were very proud of being among the first companies in their country to automate this part of their fast-growing business.
Now to answer the question about how EDI applies to your business. There are several scenarios to consider. Let’s concentrate on two main ones, small and large businesses. The first scenario relates to small businesses that must comply with the demands of their large customers. For example, John, a small farmer who sells his delicious strawberries at the local Walmart, is obligated to send multiple sets of documents in an electronic format in order to do business with them. As you can imagine, due to the volume of information in Walmart’s supply chain, no Walmart employee will pick up a phone call from John and note that he will be sending 3 cases of strawberries sometime next week. Not at all, to comply, John goes to Meade Willis’ web portal and creates all the necessary documents there in easy-to-use online forms. Everything that needs to be sent to or received from Walmart is done via Meade Willis’ website.
The second scenario applies to larger companies. When you are a larger company you may have an IT system or multiple systems in place. Systems such as an ERP (SAP, Epicor) or accounting system (Quick books) provide options to send or receive any documents directly from or to your tech-savvy business partners in an automated way. You can do it all by calling Meade Willis to assess your needs and implement the magic of generating and displaying documents in whatever format your native system uses. You can also have many more options by requesting various business rules be applied to your company’s workflow, such as: setting up error notifications, all documents to be displayed in a certain format, etc. Meade Willis also provides an XRP EDI web portal where you can see all the business analytics, statuses of your documents within the workflow and generate reports, as well as play around with specific charts (Business Intelligence) and manually create documents.
Now, I can talk about EDI benefits all day and night but the most important thing to remember is that it saves you time and money. What else can be more important than that? It stands to reason that if you automate your time-consuming manual processes and rely on technology – it will save your employees precious time and allow them to concentrate on your core business. Since time is money, think of it as every hour you are paying your staff to create manual, error-prone documents and then work on the all issues that arise from that (dispute resolution, etc.).
EDI can appear quite complex, technical and let’s face it – dry for some. Since in most cases the decision to switch to EDI is mostly taken by not so technical people – we, at Meade Willis, make sure to speak your language. And for those of you who are interested in more EDI business cases, I will be writing a follow-up article about some of the best ones from Meade Willis’ history.
-OV
How A Warehouse Management System Will Boost Your Business?
Companies seeking to upgrade their product chain may have to consider improving their storage facilities with one of the countless Warehouse Management Systems available for sale today. Before actually taking into consideration the buy of a new software system, it is vital to review the network’s capabilities in order to determine if the existing network can support the requirements of the software.
Your company’s IT supervisor will be able to provide you with the capabilities of the prevailing network and recommend or if it is smart to update the network as you get the new Warehouse Software Systems. If your network is many years old, it might be a benefit to make an upgrade when the software is bought.
If your warehouse will not have today’s computer network or you do not have IT professional personnel, most of the companies offering this software can also help you on the correct design and execution of the network to ensure that its features will properly meet their system’s requirements. These suggestions can prevent costly errors in the system as it pertains time to upgrade your procedures to other services.
If you have warehouses in multiple places, you might want to consider an online Warehouse Management package. These packages work in the cloud and can be efficiently upgraded simply by the organization anytime.
Advantages of Warehouse Management
Selecting the most appropriate Warehouse Management software will help you reduce warehouse operation costs, which includes labor costs and loss prevention. This software may also help you improve customer support, keeping your valuable clients and giving you recommendations and home-based business. This is what makes it possible to expedite your order satisfaction over the table. Companies today are able to keep a whole lot of inventory available simply looking forward to in order to come in.
important warehouse efficiency is the invoice and delivery of goods. Warehouse software might help improve this process and optimize multi-distribution operations. All of this information is delivered instantly providing you an up-to-date look at your warehouse inventory.
Automating Warehouse processes such as workflow and serial number tracking can easily reduce the loss of income. These systems could be customized to meet your exclusive workflow requirements, including allocation, kitting, and more. Choosing the right Systems for your stock will lead to more profits and make development less difficult. If you are working one office or multiple regions and countries, there is a Warehouse Management system that can meet your specific business requirements.
Moving products in huge quantities might end up being a problem without Warehouse Management systems assisting workers. Actually, if these systems are made to lower labor costs, then it is a substantial component of warehouse management. Products won’t scan and register independently, as workers want to do such jobs done with scanners. The code for every marked item is delivered to the computer for indexing as well as monitoring without any issues. Warehouse software for products management also offers another advantage: making certain the orders are correct. Since there will be no room for errors when deliveries have to be made, the system helps employees in getting the correct items for delivery. The machine considerably lowers human mistakes in the distribution of products, and this means more income.
Inventory Enhancement Tips
Every successful businessman knows that the key to success is the effective and efficient management of inventory. Being able to monitor and track inventory is important when it comes to planning and could mean the difference between being able to meet the demands of your customers and always falling short in terms of supply. This is the reason why businesses from all over the world spend millions of dollars every year as they try to put systems in place that will lead to inventory management within their operations. Deciding to take measures aimed at inventory enhancement is, by all means, an important decision and one that could save you a lot of money by lowering overall costs and make you more money by increasing overall productivity. Here are some tips which, if well implemented, can help you improve your inventory management and even enhance it.
Use inventory management software
Gone are the days when businesses were forced to rely on manual entry spreadsheets for inventory management. There are many problems associated with this approach and all of them just deduct from the productivity of your operations and the profitability of your business. Even just the process of inputting the data about the stock that you currently have can be a big problem if you have to do it manually. Not only will you have to dedicate tons of expensive man-hours in doing the job but there is also the possibility of errors during the data entry process. However, even doing something as simple as introducing barcodes for inventory tracking can significantly reduce both the labor and the time taken to collect and store inventory data and there is also the added advantage that it is more accurate and the possibility of errors during data input is eliminated.
Another reason why getting an inventory management system in place is important is that it can give you better insights that you can use to make informed decisions about the way forward for your company especially with regards to the management of your inventory. Most of the best inventory management systems usually come with a host of powerful reporting and analytic tools which effectively remove the guesswork from the entire planning process. What’s more, you will usually be able to automatically generate different types of reports at any time and this is important because it gives you real-time information about your stock positions at any given time.
Training your staff
Another way to enhance inventory within your company is by training your staff and employees on the best inventory management practices. Simply implementing an inventory management system within your company alone is not going to be very helpful if you do not have people who understand and are able to use the system to get you the kind of results that you were looking for in the first place. Fortunately, most of the best vendors of this software usually provide additional training and onboarding for client staff and you should take advantage of this to bring your staff on board with the new system.
Meeting The Criteria – Do You Need A Cloud-Based Warehouse Management System?
Cloud computing is the phrase that is on everybody’s lips right now and, as you might expect, it has made its way into the world of warehouse management. Regular desktop-based warehouse management systems were and are still powerful- but the entry of cloud-based warehouse management systems promises to be a game changer in more ways than one. Which is why companies from all over the world are turning to these new solutions to streamline and improve their processes. If you do not have any warehouse management system or if you are thinking about improving the one that you already have then you should definitely be thinking about implementing a cloud-based warehouse management system. But, before you do so, it is important to remember that not all businesses need such a system. Most experts agree that such a system is best for businesses that are categorized as Tier 1 and Tier 2 businesses although recent years have shown that they are just as great for some of the Tier 3 companies as well. So how can you tell whether or not you should implement a cloud-based WMS? Below are some questions whose answers should tell you whether or not you need such a system.
Do you want to access your inventory positions anytime, anywhere?
The biggest advantage of a cloud-based warehouse management system over the more traditional desktop-based warehouse management systems is that it allows users to have real-time access to their inventory positions from any part of the world and from any device with a reliable internet connection. This makes it ideal for a business that has operations in different locations and whose inventory is more widely distributed.
Do you run a seasonal business with extended breaks?
Most of the cloud-based warehouse management systems out there have very flexible payment plans which allow users to only pay for what they are actually going to use. So if, for instance, your business is what would be referred to as seasonal then there are months during the years when it will not be operational. At such time, you could benefit from a WMS that comes with a monthly payment plan since you will then only have to pay for months during which you actually use the system and not during the months when your company is not operational.
Do you have limited IT resources within your company?
Setting up an in-house warehouse management system is usually cost intensive and you will have to be prepared to spend a good deal of money buying all the necessary equipment. Not to mention the fact that you will need to have a team of IT experts to install and manage the WMS in your company. However, most of these problems are eliminated when you choose to go for a cloud-based warehouse management system. Not only do you avoid having to buy equipment but you also get access to top IT skills through the support provided by the WMS vendors.
How to Choose the Right Inventory System for Your Business
Whether you run a small physical store with less than 20 customers a day or a large online store serving thousands of customers every day, one thing that will always remain constant is the fact that you need to know your inventory. You should always be aware of how much stock you have at any given time. Traditionally most businesses have relied on spreadsheets to do the job but while this solution might be effective enough for a small business, it becomes near obsolete when you have a large business with thousands of items in your inventory. Not only because of the fact that collecting and feeding that information into a spreadsheet is time-consuming and labor-intensive but also because of the possibility of human errors that are likely to be made when typing data into the spreadsheets. The only way out of this problem is automation. An automated inventory system will, effectively, take the guesswork out of inventory management and allow you to know exactly how much stock you have at any given time.
With tons of inventory management systems on the market and all claiming to be able to get the job done, it can be quite difficult to choose the right one. Fortunately, you do not necessarily have to try out each and every one of them in order to find the right one if you know exactly what you need and you understand what you need to be looking for. Some of the most important factors to consider when searching for an inventory system include the following:
- Inventory tracking- this is probably the most important feature of any inventory management system and one that you must absolutely make sure is available before you even think about buying the software. Inventory tracking helps you to maintain real-time information about all the stock in your inventory and allows you to keep track of inbound and outbound stock at all times. This is important because it will help you to avoid understocking or overstocking both of which are dangerous for your business.
- Warehouse management- if you have more than a single warehouse and the warehouses are located in different places then it can be quite difficult to manage all of the manually. However, a good inventory management system will usually come with a warehouse management feature that you can use to track inter-warehouse transfers and maintain more accurate records of your inventory positions across all the warehouses.
- Analytics and reporting- reporting and analytics are important because they do not just tell you about your inventory positions but provide you with useful insight into the performance of the inventory. Through these features, you will be able to know which stocks are not performing and need to be reduced as well as the ones that are performing well and need to be increased.
3 Impactful Warehouse Management Tips to Improve Inventory Control
Being organized bestows great endowments. Having an established and reliable warehouse management will unequivocally reward you with great returns. The warehouse is principal to any business exploit, and it is paramount to stay on top of basics warehouse management.
Being organized bestows great endowments. Having an established and reliable warehouse management will unequivocally reward you with great returns. The warehouse is principal to any business exploit, and it is paramount to stay on top of basics warehouse management.
Being organized bestows great endowments. Having an established and reliable warehouse management will unequivocally reward you with great returns. The warehouse is principal to any business exploit, and it is paramount to stay on top of basics warehouse management.
5 Biggest Warehouse Management Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
Smart organizations run efficiently and productively. The less time and effort that’s squandered in completing a task, the healthier the primary concern will look in the long run. That goes for all procedures, and your warehouse is not an exception.
Smart organizations run efficiently and productively. The less time and effort that’s squandered in completing a task, the healthier the primary concern will look in the long run. That goes for all procedures, and your warehouse is not an exception.
Smart organizations run efficiently and productively. The less time and effort that’s squandered in completing a task, the healthier the primary concern will look in the long run. That goes for all procedures, and your warehouse is not an exception.
