Orderful's EDI System Address Major Challenges

Building a cloud based EDI system has been a dream of mine for the past 7 years. I’ve grown passionate about providing an EDI system through experiencing the pain our customers feel. It’s the feeling that repeatedly exposes the complexity of the problem and sometimes lack of ability of the customer.

I was lucky enough to start a consulting firm in 2013 that has given me the gift of both learning more about the real-life problems of customers handling EDI and has provided the foundation to build a SaaS product designed to address these challenges. For the last two years, we’ve been focused on building Orderful to solve the EDI frustrations of our customers.

There are three main problems with EDI that we are passionate about solving. First, is the ability to quickly service a system that requires immediate attention. Second, we want to remove the stress of managing EDI for our customers. Finally, we want to change the behavior of organizations who are accepting failure or complacency as common practice.

Immediate and Self-Service

Everything we do is influenced by our customer’s experience at the front of decisions. The greatest companies in the world focus on the customer’s experience. Amazon, Nordstrom, and Apple to name a few. You can’t argue with their willingness to perform for the customer. We are just as fanatical about customer service as these industry masters. Support requests, problems, and questions rise often when we least expect it. We provide a service that notifies customers about problems in real-time. Our customer service improves our customer’s customer service. Serving our customers in the cloud grants us immediate access to integrations, forces us to build focused support tools, and pushes our product to provide transparent access to information.

Removing Stress and Making EDI Systems Easy

The acronym EDI introduces the feeling of stress to suppliers. We are improving our customers’ lives by handling this technical complexity. The way companies talk about their challenges suggests that EDI has been a source of frustration for years, without an end in sight. The frustration and stress experienced by these companies come from a lack of transparency from their EDI system provider. Whether I’m talking with a customer that has 20 trading partners or 1000, we hear the same theme. “EDI has been a challenge since we started trading. We have iterated a number of times and always end up with the same problems.” The challenge with EDI is not only the technical complexity. It is rooted in the human element of trading flat files and managing expectations across the organization when something doesn’t work out as planned. We are inspired to change our customer’s perspective on EDI.

Accepting Everything but Failure

Changing human behavior is achieved when there is a level of trust built with our users. Orderful’s EDI system will provide the information they need when they need it. EDI as a process has been around for over 40 years. Organizations have adopted bad EDI habits over those years. These behaviors have not changed over time. In fact, they continue to pile on and become more complex. Handling EDI messages isn’t rocket science. It’s the simple transaction of passing data from one system to another.

The market is saturated with toolboxes. Competitors out there like Mulesoft, Jitterbit, Microsoft’s SSIS, Infor’s latest middleware ION and hundreds of others that claim to have the capacity of handling EDI integrations. The challenge with all of these applications is that they will never be specific enough to the problems that need solved where they can change human behavior. Orderful exposes useful data to the end-users and EDI controllers so humans don’t have to worry about same challenges they face today. Information is power, and Orderful is purposefully built to provide your team structure to manage the day-to-day and support future growth.

Orderful is purposed to influence our customer’s behavior. Every decision we as a team make when adding features, delivering material or implementing the software is focused on improving business for our customer. Through providing immediate service, insights into automated transactions and a platform of best practices for our customers, we will continue to see a positive shift in our customer’s business.