100% Return on EDI Investment

Managing and expanding an electronic trading community can be a difficult, time consuming, and expensive task. Many companies have invested in their 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 requires resources and paper-based systems to process a relatively small amount of transactions.

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

The largest challenge has been justifying the effort necessary to get low-volume trading partners to support an Electronic Commerce initiative. There is an assumption that the return on 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 truly reflect the benefits of 100% trading partner connectivity.

The second largest challenge is to manage the larger trading community efficiently. To assist with managing a large trading community 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 Electronic Commerce 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 capabilities. Whether trading partners are new to Electronic Commerce, 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% Electronic Commerce.

Our Trading Community Management solution is made up of several services:

• EnterpriseEC® - Web-based trading community management system including Internet-based and traditional VAN data transport services
• Web-EDI - Solutions for small and medium size trading partners
• Trading Community Ramping - Extends the value of e-Business
• Collaboration Extranet - Monitor and track trading community ramping
• Testing and Certification - Pre-test and certify EC-enabled trading partners