Outsourced SaaS   EDI Service

Manage Your Business, Not Your EDI

SPS Commerce’s outsourced electronic data interchange (EDI) service enables trading partners to satisfy their customers’, suppliers’ and other supply chain partners’ requirements for electronic purchase orders, ship notices, invoices and more.

Our EDI service is your answer to a comprehensive, turnkey, outsourced EDI department. The service includes technology, reusable EDI maps and staffing resources to ensure reliable and efficient interactions with trading partners. We manage all of your EDI requirements so you can focus on managing your business.

Based on a multi-tenant, software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture, SPS’ EDI services enable customers to leverage common hardware and software, infrastructure, and business and technical processes, including customer EDI maps, allowing you to easily integrate with retailers’ business processes and specifications. In addition, our team of EDI experts installs, updates and maintains your EDI system and related maps. The result is enhanced efficiency, greater reliability and lower total cost of ownership.

Integrate with Supply Chain Partners around the Globe

As manufacturers outsource more supply chain functions to domestic and global partners such as 3PLs and sourcing companies, it becomes critical to integrate these firms into EDI processes. SPS Commerce offers a superior alternative to traditional EDI software by giving trading partners real-time access to key EDI data through a standard Web browser or through a simple, but powerful application programming interface (API).

Using SPS’ multi-party capabilities, trading partners can perform such tasks as forwarding purchase orders, printing and affixing shipping labels, and sending ASNs. These improvements provide better visibility for the manufacturer and the retailer, and eliminate many manual processes that can take days out of the order fulfillment process. With SPS’ access management capability, manufacturers can offer international or third-party supply chain partners limited and secure access to outsourced EDI services. These users can be given permission to view and create certain EDI documents, such as ASNs, on behalf of the supplier for specific trading partners. Organizations can also use SPS Commerce’s services to filter and forward the content of EDI documents, such as purchase orders, to additional locations or third parties.

A Variety of Options to Support Your EDI Needs

Three types of EDI services are available based on your business needs, such as transaction volume and number of user locations:

1. Integrated EDI: Ideal for high-volume manufacturers, our integrated EDI service eliminates data entry by sending data directly into and out of your accounting, ERP, packing and shipping, and/or warehouse systems. (link to Integrated EDI fact sheet)
2. WebForms EDI: For lower transaction volumes, WebForms allows you to send and receive documents using online templates. These forms minimize keystrokes by automatically filling in information and checking for errors before documents are sent to your customers. (link to WebForms fact sheet)
3. Paper Conversion: For very low-volume businesses without a personal computer, SPS converts documents from paper to electronic file formats.

Boost Visibility and Improve Supply Chain Performance

SPS Commerce’s reporting service enhances visibility and accountability by providing insight into your interactions with trading partners. An integral part of SPS’ SaaS EDI offerings, our reporting service offers more complete, accurate and consistent data about your EDI performance than traditional EDI software. Three types of reports are available:

• Real-time query and search allow you to quickly look up documents just as you would with a web search engine like Google or Yahoo! and read them in a human-readable, paper-looking format.
• Real-time event messaging provides you with 24x7 notifications of new documents, messages from trading partners, and any potential errors and resolutions with your customers.
• Operational reports allow you to monitor day-to-day transactions. Using these reports you can verify and retrieve key EDI information, such as an advance ship notice (ASN), with ease.
• Alerts enable you to identify and isolate urgent issues requiring your immediate attention. Users are first notified of an issue via email and then directed to a report that offers additional detail on the situation.
• Business intelligence lets you evaluate the performance of your supply chain and your trading partners, and identify key issues and trends that can lead to significant operational improvement.

Whether the information is needed to quickly identify potential trouble spots or to identify trends in your EDI performance, SPS’ reporting service can help you and your trading partners achieve their EDI goals.

The SaaS EDI Advantage

Benefits of our SaaS EDI services include:

• No hardware or software to install and maintain
• Low up-front costs and total cost of ownership
• Rapid implementations for customers and supply chain partners—both domestically and globally
• Multiple input and output methods including WebForms or integration with our service via a web-based API
• Instant reliability by leveraging reusable EDI maps, field-tested by thousands of companies
• Outsourced team of EDI experts handles full range of EDI staffing tasks, including set-up, implementation, maintenance, operations, support and technical interactions with retailers