ARE YOUR TRADING PARTNERS HAPPY? 3 WAYS IMPLEMENTING EDI POSITIVELY IMPACTS B2B RELATIONSHIPS

Cultivating positive relationships with vital trading partners is an essential building block to your company's success. Mutual trust is a fundamental component of a prosperous business partnership. A B2B relationship rooted in trust and shared success ultimately drives more sales through a continued, lasting partnership. Poorly maintained relationships, however, result in miscommunication, errors, and diminished profits.If your business relies on an efficient supply chain that is fully capable of moving mission-critical business functions forward each day, then your partners need to have absolute trust in your company. They must also feel confident in your systems and procedures.Integrating Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) technology is an excellent way to demonstrate professional expertise and build trust as you develop relationships with your business partners.

1. EDI INCREASES THE ACCURACY AND SECURITY OF SHARED BUSINESS DOCUMENTS

B2B transactions can be complicated and expensive due to the sheer number of documents that must be exchanged and processed each day. When information is manually prepared and transmitted, the risk for errors in data entry increases. With human touches in the process, there is also a higher chance that critical documents could be misplaced or lost entirely.EDI makes it possible to exchange documents and information electronically in a standardized format. This data exchange is secure and ensures the accuracy and integrity of the information shared between you and your trading partners.The decrease in errors you will experience using EDI will positively impact your trading partner relationships and boost your trustworthiness through guaranteed accuracy. The companies you work with will not have to worry about, nor troubleshoot, mishandled documents. Moreover, neither will you.

2. EDI CREATES A DEPENDABLE INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

A company that manages an inventory of products for sale or distribution cannot remain profitable if that inventory is not tracked accurately. Furthermore, poor inventory management can destroy trust among trading partners and cause them to cease working together.EDI fosters lucrative and happy business partnerships by eliminating the risk of mismanaged inventory. EDI automates your inventory management and sends real-time reports, so you always know what products are available to order. This automation also minimizes errors that can occur if inventory if you previously tracked inventory manually.Such insight into your inventory levels at any moment eliminates a variety of situations that can put your business and trading partner relations at risk, including:

• Out of stock orders
• Backorders
• Partially filled orders
• Delayed orders

3. EDI ENHANCES COLLABORATION IN BUSINESS PARTNERSHIPS

Good communication is imperative to the success and vitality of a business partnership. Frequent, productive collaboration will help you identify growth goals and achieve those objectives more efficiently and quickly as you scale your business.B2B communication and requests often flow in the form of paperwork, which can follow a very slow manual process. It takes significant time to prepare, package, and send paper documents manually. Information can also be prepared incorrectly, riddled with errors, or misplaced in the process.Time is a valuable commodity in any growth initiative. Any efficient procedures you can implement will ultimately help you accomplish more success with one another.EDI enhances communication by making it simple to interact with your trading partners instantly. Using EDI, you can send orders with ease, monitor inventory, and streamline your necessary collaborations and communications. Deals that traditionally take days or even weeks to finalize you can now do in a matter of minutes with EDI. Communicating with more speed and precision, you can build immense trust with your trading partners by growing your businesses together.Quality, trusting B2B relationships require effort to help them flourish. However, by integrating EDI technology, you increase the accuracy and security of your data exchanges, improve your inventory management, and enhance your communication with business partners without doing any extra work, making errors, or wasting time.An EDI VAN is a secure, cost-effective method to consider as you implement EDI technology in your business. EDI VANs can be used to accept EDI data from all of your trading partners, and many of them are cloud based. The portability of all your important partner information will help you build more meaningful B2B partnerships while you are on the move making new ones.BOLD VAN operates on a secure network that is reliable, fast, and accessible from any device. Call today to speak with an EDI specialist at (844) 265-3777.Dig deeper, learn why Startups Need EDI In Their Business Model