Managing an electronic trading community can be a difficult, time consuming, and expensive task. Many companies have invested in the ability to transact business with their trading partners electronically, but have stopped short of gaining the full benefits of their investment.

Most companies are satisfied with converting 80% of paper documents to fully integrated electronic transactions. While this is very beneficial, the other 20% still require resources and paper-based systems to process a relatively small number of transactions.

In fact, it is this last 20% that may bring the most benefit from the initial investment in doing EDI. By achieving 100% conversion of a targeted trading community on-line, the internal costs associated with maintaining the ability to process paper transactions can be eliminated completely.

The greatest challenge has been justifying the effort required to get low-volume trading partners to support an EDI initiative. There is an assumption that the effort needed to get small and medium size trading partner participation does not provide a large enough return to justify the resource expenditure. Due to the costs of supporting both electronic and paper-based systems, this assumption may not fully reflect the true benefits of 100% trading partner connectivity.

The second largest challenge is to manage the larger trading community efficiently. To address this, Edict Systems has developed an extensive set of web-based tools. These tools monitor trading partner activity and document flow, provide activity reports, send e-mails to trading partners when document receipt is not acknowledged, and provide sophisticated document searching capabilities.

Edict Systems has developed solutions to enable our customers to effectively manage large trading communities and to extend the value of existing EDI capabilities deeper within a trading community to maximize the benefits of transacting business electronically.

Our solutions enable 100% participation from all trading partners regardless of their size or technical expertise. Whether trading partners are new to EDI, or just haven't added support for a new trading partnership due to low volume or priority, we have solutions that take the pain and expense out of reaching the ultimate goal - 100% EDI compliance.

Please call us at 800.443.3428 or e-mail solutions@edictsystems.com for more information on how we can help you and your trading partners maximize the value of your existing and future Electronic Data Interchange capabilities.