EDI (Electronic Document Interchange)

EricG

EricG

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Aug 2, 2011
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Good Afternoon,

We are looking at EDI solutions to better integrate ourselves with carriers and clients.

What EDI options are available to transportation firms such as ourselves? I'd be interesting in chatting with anyone that has EDI experience in the trucking industry.
 
Eric,

EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange. It is actually very old technology used by antiquated industries such as ours. ;-). The newest thing is API Web Services which allow your system to pull data from carrier's websites including transit info, tracking, pricing etc. That being said, EDI is still heaviliy used and won't go away for some time. Here is some info on the type of data you can push and pull through EDI:

http://redtailsolutions.com/products-and-services/included-edi-services/transaction-types/

If you have any questions, give me a shout anytime...just not today ;-)
 
I'm definitely not an EDI expert and my eyes glaze over as soon as it is even mentioned, the one thing I do know is do your research and put the right system in because everyone is a little different so if you have someone on staff who can understand the lingo then you can start doing a lot of the mapping yourself without having to pay an outside vendor every time a change is needed. It does make life a lot easier to have orders going direct into your system without having to do any keying and same with billing.
 
Thanks,

We are looking at it from a tracking/status/pod perspective initially, the billing integration is an added bonus.

We would probably do the data mapping internally as we have done alot of third party integration and in house application development. We are fortunate enough to have a team of software developers and testing/deployment staff in house.

Does anyone have any recommendations on trading partners or value added networks EDI providers that specialize in the transportation industry?

Ideally we would like to obtain integration with the following carriers;

QuikX, Apex, TransX, Polaris, Gardewine, Midland Transport, as that should give us a good head start.

We currently have API interfaces to various carriers based web services for integration carriers such as FedEx, UPS etc.

I'm open to hearing thoughts on proceeding with the above carriers? any insight as to what I may be getting us into? Seems that its hard to get ahold of the IT staff at certain carriers to even begin a discussion about EDI integration.
 
Polaris already has an online platform that lets you track and rate your frieght.. I don't know about the others as I haven't used them enough to really know what's available.
 
I agree that it's quite old technology. Generally a customer won't want EDI with you unless there is a large piece of business associated because the cost to you and the cost for them for IT resources, whether internal or external, is not small and it has to be justified. Customers seem to be more willing to use TMS platforms nowadays.
 
Freight Broker said:
Polaris already has an online platform that lets you track and rate your frieght.. I don't know about the others as I haven't used them enough to really know what's available.
Click to expand...

We already use the Polaris online web platform, however we where hoping to automate the task of tracking, pod'ing, booking as it consumes a significant amount of time on a daily basis to track, trace, update status in our system, pod order etc. Manual updates are a way to resource intensive from a human aspect, this includes email POD, email shipment alerts, pdf carrier confirmations etc... all these take time to data enter and read.

Honestly, It doesn't bother me what method we use, I just want an fully automated interface, with the end result of reducing hours utilized by a human for something a computer can do.
 
theman said:
I agree that it's quite old technology. Generally a customer won't want EDI with you unless there is a large piece of business associated because the cost to you and the cost for them for IT resources, whether internal or external, is not small and it has to be justified. Customers seem to be more willing to use TMS platforms nowadays.
Click to expand...

That is the beauty of having freight volumes, we can leverage volume towards carriers that made our lives and efficient easy from an administration aspect as its not just always about driver/carrier ops performance, admin overhead of working with a carrier is also factored into costs. Realistically, pricing is pretty consistent among carriers once your able to leverage company/carrier annual volumes in rate negotiations.
 
Michael,

Thank you very much for the lead, I have reached out to them today, as upon reviewing their website it seems like a good fit. I was also looking at Sterling Commerce (IBM Division) as another Value Added Network Provider.

If anyone has any other recommendations on EDI Providers I'm open to suggestions.
 
reviving this here, any other options to consider besides the 2 mentioned here? looking for comparable's and a pricing structure a human can understand.
 
Whenever clients have demanded EDI, we use SPS Commerce. EDI requests are infrequent but usually demanded by large clients.
 
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