What is an EDI provider?

For a business to get connected to a trading partner and begin sending EDI they must first get EDI compliant with an EDI provider. EDI providers vary from one another. Here are some of the criteria you must consider when choosing the right EDI provider for your business.

Pricing

How much does it cost to use an EDI system over paper-based methods? This all depends on how much usage of an EDI provider you are going to use. Trading partners often have packages to choose from which vary in both price and features.

Cheap packages might only let you connect to a single trading partner and limit how many EDI files you can interact with, whereas an expensive featureful EDI system may not restrict you but your business might not utilize all the features, therefore, you are wasting money. It does pay off to go and do some research on what you need for the EDI aspect of your business.

Reliability

Without question, EDI is a far more reliable solution for sending and receiving business documents than traditional methods.

But EDI isn’t necessarily flawless. Choosing a cheap EDI provider with an old EDI system could be unreliable and prone to errors.

Although you are using a provider it still looks bad on your end if you keep sending incorrect data to a trading partner. This could lead to bad business relationships between trading partners and impact your business in the future.

Document standards

Most suppliers support the essential EDI document standards such as EDIFACT, TRADACOMS and X12.

Sometimes a supplier will want to connect to a trading partner that uses different standards like ODETTE, SWIFT and VDA which some EDI providers might lack.

For this reason, it’s important to make sure your provider of choice supports the EDI Document standards your trading partner requires.

Support

Sometimes accidents happen and you might send or receive a file with incorrect information.

Hopefully, this doesn’t happen often but in a situation like this, it’s good knowing you have world-class tech support to fall back on.

Trading partners

Every EDI supplier will most likely support all major trading partners. But it’s still a good idea to think a couple of years down the line and consider which trading partners you will want to connect to in the future.

Another thing to consider is some EDI providers might only support trading partners from specific sectors.

User Experiences

This can often be overlooked but if your business is using EDI someone is going to using an EDI portal for most of the working day.

Choosing a provider with a bad user interface is not a good option.

A provider with an unclear dashboard could lead to time wasting trying to find a certain feature.