Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Tips and Tools of the Trade
EDI is a widely used method of sending business transaction documents across the internet. This can include purchase orders, sales orders, invoices, receipts, as well as many other document types. A business can take any one of these documents and send it across the internet as a text file. If you think about it, it’s actually kind of amazing. We, as a species, are sending 100’s of billions of dollars across the internet, and sometimes across the planet, in little text files. Thank goodness for modern encryption methods, otherwise hacking might become a lucrative career path. How does a person become good at transmitting EDI? It’s a trick question. We really can’t. It’s all done by computers. What we can do is become more knowledgeable about it. Learning about EDI can greatly enhance a person’s ability to configure and troubleshoot more efficiently. Here are some areas that I highly recommend spending time with so that you might become more efficient too.
The first one is knowing what tools you have at your disposal for generating and troubleshooting EDI related transmissions. Technically, you could probably do EDI with just a text editor like notepad and an internet connection, but that would not be efficient. The biggest tool for me at the company I work for is our ERP system. A couple examples of ERP systems would be Salesforce…
