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E-Trading is now available for any sized business, it doesn’t have to be expensive or require huge changes to your current operations. Sure, you can invest in the fully integrated electronic systems that will allow all business documents to be exchanged, but many just start with one document type.
For example, you may wish to receive the orders in the normal manner, i.e. email or fax/phone, and then manually enter the information into your ERP system. Once you have despatched the goods you may then wish to send the Invoice back automatically from your back office electronically. Many of Burdens' customers operate in this manner, and through the years have then integrated the Ordering side as well to ensure maximum benefits can be achieved through E-Trading.
Third party specialist’s vendors will now have the flexibility to allow you to upload your invoices or orders manually on a portal, they will then covert and send the date to the relevant party in their required format. There is also the ability to now take invoices off of a portal and print them in the required format, pdf or whatever, so although this may not be E-Trading, it still saves on postage etc.
Burdens have key relationships with all of the main specialist vendors who enable companies to trade electronically. Through these key channels, Burdens can trade in any manner the customer or supplier may wish.
In a perfect world all business documents would be exchanged electronically with no need for paper, all documents would match perfectly and require no human intervention at all. Of course this would never happen as we live in the real world where there will always be discrepancies.
You don’t have to invest heavily to start trading electronically, it makes sense to start with one business document before embarking on a full rollout, and usually this would be to send or receive invoices. If your ERP system is not able to accept or send data out in this manner then the third parties are able to accept PDF or CSV documents for example and then map accordingly into your trading partner's required format.
The Scan approach is becoming much more popular with smaller organisations that are not able to invest in EDI. If you choose to scan your invoices in and send them to a portal, you could save around £5,000 a year based on 10,000 invoices but £140,000 if you choose to send the same amount for Purchase Orders and Invoices via EDI.
Lower Transaction Costs due to:
Burdens use all of the above business information on a daily basis. By exchanging them electronically allows resources to be focused on other business operations.
Improved Cash Flow due to:
The traditional EDI communication route is through a VAN (Value Added Network). This is where a private network provider leases its communication lines to its subscribers; they are usually very secure and ensure message delivery. They do though incur extra charges and are becoming less favourable as AS2 is now leading the way.
As there isn’t one way to send data in one standard format then these specialists ensure the data is converted in the required format. Imagine one person talking in Japanese and another in Spanish trying to communicate, well they would require a translator to understand each other - the same principles apply in EDI.
However, with advances in the Internet, the most favourable communication method is AS2 (Applicability Statement 2), which is fast, secure and doesn’t carry high costs. The most popular format to put a business document in is XML (Extensible Markup Language).
Advances in technology and the internet meant this method became:
