• A low cost EDI solution may not be the best solution for you always
• At the same time, you don’t have to over pay for implementing an EDI solution
• You need to know what works best for your business from a cost and support perspective
• Learn what are the possible risks in buying a “low-cost” EDI solution

When you first contact us to help fulfill the mandate from your trading partners or if you are looking to scale your business, most likely what goes in your mind is “can EDI Support help us install a low cost EDI solution?”

Let us explain you what it might mean in real business terms:

• A “low cost” EDI Solution (whether on-premise or hosted on cloud) could mean that you don’t have to pay any upfront fee to buy the solution but a monthly subscription fee

• It could also mean you have to pay minimal upfront but pay per transaction

At this point, we know that you are not aware of the risks you might face choosing a solution like the two listed above. These two solutions may seem like a perfect fit financially if you are just starting out and that’s ok.

With over 25 years of experience implementing EDI solutions and working with companies all sizes small, medium and large enterprises, our advice to you always will be to look at EDI as a digital addition to your business that helps you gain trust with your customers/trading partners, increases your team’s efficiency, reduces errors and eventually helps you scale up. 

The reason we say this is because running EDI is a support-intensive process and you will definitely need knowledge and guidance from an expert either in-house or outside to avoid any errors or chargebacks going forward. A “low cost” solution may not provide all the features or full-support or serve your document integration needs while you are looking to develop a good relation with your trading partner(s) or scale up your business with others in the market. 

In turn, such a solution may cost you loss of faith from your customers and eventually loss of revenue. So, when you are exploring different EDI Solutions in the market, ask relevant questions about the features of the solutions, how are these features helping you achieve your goals of scaling up quickly with your trading partners, what kind of customer support is provided. 

Even though an old solution that been there since 1970s, EDI is still the gold standard for 99% of the trading partners you want to do business with. Think of an EDI Solution as a marketing tool for your business. When you present your product(s) to your customer(s) and you say you are EDI-enabled, that is a step forward to your foot in the door. This clearly shows you have done your research on their requirements and you are serious about doing business with them.

Automating your order-to-cash cycle with an EDI solution that best suits your business is the way to go if you looking to increase your revenue, gain trust and credibility with your customers and save an incredible amount of time and money processing documents manually.