Tuesday, January 20, 2009

SAP and Agile EDI for Supply Chain and Logisitics Management

SAP supply chain and logistics EDI and B2B implementations can often take years. An expensive EDI system must be purchased, installed and staff trained. Supply chain and logistic partners must be informed of your desire to implement EDI (electronic data exchange) and agree to support it. Your trading partners must be prioritized, scheduled and tested. If you have a small EDI team and thousands of suppliers and dozens of 3PLs it will take many years to get your supply chain and third party logistics providers automated.

The key question to ask about the above scenario is - does this effort and time frame satisfy the needs of your business? If not, then you must find a better and more agile strategy that does. Often you can find managed EDI and B2B service providers that have already implemented electronic data exchanges with tens of thousands of industry participants. By connecting once to this EDI Hub you can save considerable time and effort and have a much more agile and on-demand EDI and B2B strategy.

By on-demand, I mean the ability to simply request that the managed EDI and B2B service provider implement an electronic data exchange with a specific set of trading partners and within a specific time frame.


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Kevin Benedict
Blog on EDI/B2B Issues - http://b2b-bpo.blogspot.com/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinbenedict

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