Tired of Chargebacks? Orderful’s EDI system has you covered

An EDI system allows retailers and suppliers to communicate and exchange supply chain transactions with one another. As a supplier, one of the hardest parts about getting your EDI system up and running is complying with each retailer’s guidelines. What does it mean to be EDI compliant? It’s the ability to send and receive transactions that meet the guidelines required by your trading partners.

Each retailer has specific guidelines for how their transactions are expected to be formatted. For example, Target’s guidelines are different from Walmart’s guidelines, across their various EDI transaction types. If you’re non-compliant with your trading partners’ guidelines, you’ll receive significant chargebacks.

It all starts when a supplier receives a PDF of a retailer’s guidelines. The guidelines outline how they expect to receive purchase orders, invoices and other transactions. Once connected to a retailer’s ERP system, you must map the requirements from their guidelines to your ERP system. This requires writing custom code to ensure the data leaving your ERP system is mapped in such a way that it matches the retailer’s requirements.  

An EDI system like Orderful cuts out all the tedious work. We handle the mapping and digitize all your trading partners’ guidelines in one place. Let’s take a look at why guidelines are such a headache and how Orderful enables EDI compliance.

A Solid Cloud EDI System Does the Dirty Work for You

If you’ve been working with EDI for long enough, you understand the consequences of sending failed EDI transactions to retailers. You’ll receive a chargeback for sending a transaction that is non-compliant with your trading partner’s guidelines. Twenty failed invoices in a day at $100 each can add up quickly.  These mistakes are known as chargebacks.

It’s critical to ensure your EDI transactions meet your retail trading partners’ guidelines. Traditionally, for every connection you build with a retailer, a human being on either end has to run tests to make sure the data is transmitted correctly. This process can take a considerable amount of time and energy, often weeks of going back and forth.

Rather than devoting more manpower to the EDI configuration and testing process, adopt a cloud EDI system that’ll handle the heavy lifting for you.

Data Validation and Testing in Real-Time

Orderful is a modern EDI system that allows you to consolidate all your EDI data into one place. We enter your trading partners’ guideline requirements for each of their transaction types into the platform. Before a transaction is sent to a retailer, the data gets validated against the trading partners’ guidelines in real time.

With other EDI systems, a failed transaction could stop all other transactions. Your business is essentially at a standstill. However, at Orderful that’s not the case. If there’s an error during the data validation process, you won’t incur any chargebacks. Instead, our platform easily identifies where the error is and you can fix it on the fly. Your other transactions are not held hostage if one document has an error, business flows as usual.  

On top of that, we cut out having to test transactions back and forth directly with your trading partners. Before a customer goes live they can pass a series of test transactions through the platform. They are instantly validated against the trading partners’ guidelines. This speeds up the testing process and leaves the retailer out of it, giving you peace of mind that chargebacks are now a thing of the past.

Avoid Chargebacks With Orderful

A common scenario where you’ll run into potential chargebacks is for sending bad data.

An advanced shipping notice (often abbreviated as ASN or 856) provides tracking and packing information for a pending delivery. For example, if the guideline for Walmart’s ASN requires the “date” to be formatted as YYMMDD, however, your ERP system spits out DDMMYY. If you tried to send Walmart an ASN with DDMMYY as the data element for “date”, your transaction would fail and you’d receive a chargeback from Walmart.

Orderful’s rules engine allows you to manipulate data so you can comply with each trading partners’ guidelines. Rather than dealing with a failed transaction, you can write a rule within the rules engine that says for every ASN for Walmart convert DDMMYY to YYMMDD. It’s as simple as writing a formula in Microsoft Excel. Once the rule is written, it’s applied to every subsequent transaction with the same data element.

Orderful allows suppliers to easily connect and trade EDI data with any buyer. Connect once to our cloud API platform, from there we handle all the guideline requirements, connectivity, and translation for all of your trading partners. There’s no need for custom point-to-point integrations or costly EDI consultants. Our platform allows for automated data trading and prevents you from sending any failed transactions that can result in hefty chargebacks.