How Emerge Scales Freight Procurement with Modern EDI

In this insightful conversation, Bob Bowman, Editor in Chief of Supply Chain Brain, brings together Kyle Jepson, Senior Vice President of Product at Emerge, and Erik Kiser, CEO of Orderful, to discuss how modernizing Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for freight procurement has transformed Emerge’s operations. As a fast-growing company in the logistics industry, Emerge turned to Orderful’s modern EDI solution to streamline their processes and ensure seamless communication with enterprise-level customers. Throughout the interview, both Kyle and Erik share their experiences and highlight the advantages of implementing a modern, API-driven EDI system for improved efficiency, scalability, and future-proofing. Embracing Orderful’s innovative solution has not only revolutionized Emerge’s approach to EDI but has also enabled them to get to market faster, creating a competitive edge in the industry.

Bob Bowman, Editor in Chief of Supply Chain Brain

For a case study about electronic data interchange modernization for freight procurement, I’m joined by Kyle Jepsen, Senior Vice President of Product at Emerge. Hi Kyle.

Kyle Jepson, Senior Vice President of Product at Emerge

Hey, how’s it going?

Bob Bowman

Good. Thanks for joining me. Erik Kiser, CEO of Orderful. Hello, Erik.

Erik Kiser, CEO of Orderful

Hi Robert. Good morning.

Bob Bowman

Thanks again to both of you for being with me today. I want to start by asking Kyle to just give me a quick overview of Emerge.

Kyle Jepson

Emerge is an industry leading procurement platform focused on the logistics industry. Also coupled with our unique marketplace offering, so really focused on matching shippers and carriers together to optimize the procurement process.

Bob Bowman

Why is EDI or electronic data interchange so important to your business, Kyle?

Kyle Jepson

We are largely focused on working with enterprise level customers. They do not like data entry. EDI is the way that the industry communicates. Although we’d love to say API’s are the future, the reality is EDI is here for now, and I think in the future for quite some time as well.

Bob Bowman

So what were your goals when looking for a modern EDI solution?

Kyle Jepson

We operate with a lot of developers who are used to working with traditional web services. The older flat file integrations, the connectivity of EDI is something that’s foreign to our company. We found Orderful is a great solution to really modernize that and allow our developers to work with languages they’re familiar with. And they took on a lot of the responsibility of the configurations and the more complex sides that are really native to EDI and let us do what we were good at and let them focus on being our EDI solution.

Bob Bowman

Was Orderful an instant choice or did you look around at the market and see and choose them above all others. How did that work? How’d you bring them in?

Kyle Jepson

We looked at several legacy providers, as well as some more modern approaches. We really liked the way that they approached EDI as a whole. And when we compared them to comparable solutions out there, their platform was just far and above, much better, more robust, and much further along than a lot of the other providers in the space.

Bob Bowman

Erik how does this track with what Orderful had already provided to its customer base prior to your engagement with Emerge. Was it pretty much in the ballpark of what you’ve done before?

Erik Kiser

Yeah, it’s right down the middle. At Orderful we’re focused on logistics and supply chain data integrations. We typically work with other SaaS platforms, like Emerge, that have many customers. What the challenge is, is that a company like Emerge, Block Freight and other large SaaS platforms, is with all of their customers, they must enable EDI on behalf of their customers. What Kyle was mentioning around the need for modern technology, is that his team is full of engineers. And what Orderful offers is a modern API where any enterprise and in particular other SaaS companies can use tools that they’re familiar with. Because we’re an API, we make it really easy for a company like Emerge to connect once to us. Then what we do is we will automatically validate, convert, and communicate that EDI data on their behalf. So this was a very natural use case and fit for us.

Bob Bowman

Well, Erik, you’ve made a couple of references to APIs application programming interfaces, and I’m just wondering what is the state of EDI right now? It’s been around for pretty much a couple of decades, nothing new about it. But as it matured, what is modern EDI compared with what it was in its original conception? How did that track with what you were able to provide to Emerge?

Erik Kiser

We are the most differentiated product in the market. In terms of offering a modern solution, Orderful as an API first company, from day one, we adopted API principles in terms of building our product. Everything that you can do in our UI, you can use an API to programmatically control your integration. So what that means for a company like Emerge is not only can they transact, in their case they are connecting with carriers who are trading 204s, 214s, 210s, not only can they transact those messages, but they can also pull metadata down from our API’s to show in their platform the success of those transactions. And that’s very unique about Orderful. The state of EDI has mostly been around transacting. A lot of the legacy providers or incumbents provide you a managed service or some sort of tooling to build your own integrations to your own supply chain. And what’s unique about Orderful is we are a fairly SaaS self-service product, where our customers can connect once to our API and then access a larger network to start trading with their supply chain through that connection.

Bob Bowman

Kyle, how did this all translate into what you needed at Emerge? What was involved in the implementation of this solution? I assume you had been using EDI to some degree before this and this was an upgrade to a modern EDI. What was involved in bringing this onto your platform?

Kyle Jepson

We are actually unique and we chose Orderful as a greenfield solution. We were just starting as a company and we knew we were going to need to get into the EDI space to transact with our first few enterprise customers. And so we were greenfield with Orderful. In past lives, we have worked with other tools like Liaison and the more traditional EDI platforms that were hosted in-house. So we’re very familiar with those processes. The actual implementation took us about 45 days to stand up from zero to sending our first messages. That involved building the connection to the API, managing specs and mapping on our end. And to be honest, most of the work was just changing our system to really support the broader workflows that were going to be needed for EDI. So if someone had a lot of those in place, it would probably be much faster than that. But we were really working from the ground up to establish those workflows, the message types, etc. It was a pretty straightforward and simple process for us. Really Orderful allowed us to offload the EDI specific kind of nuances of parsing files, connecting to servers, and really modernize that and bring it into a RESTful connection that we’re very used to working with. So I think that really led to that accelerated time frame. There’s some lessons that we learned throughout that but compared to past lives, where it took us a year plus to stand up EDI for troubled facing customers. This is a much faster integration and allowed us to get to market and ultimately open up new revenue opportunities with many different shippers almost immediately.

Bob Bowman

And in that 45 days it didn’t disrupt your efforts to continue to transact key documents while you were bringing it onboard?

Kyle Jepson

For us it was really a blocker to even starting business. So we went from zero to 100 with them. It opened up opportunities for us. We didn’t have challenges some other organizations may have downgrading the legacy system and replacing it with Orderful.

Bob Bowman

Erik and Kyle, what are the benefits now that this is in place at Emerge? What did Emerge get from you guys that they didn’t have before? How did you help them out?

Erik Kiser

Like Kyle said, they were at ground zero. We just enabled their business to start to operate. They’ve been a great partner with us since day one. A little bit more about Emerge’s environment, is that they have about 150 connections on Orderful now and they’ve been on for maybe a year and a half. So there’s been a lot of growth with them as well. But what they got from us are three main things. The first is simplified integrations. Where traditionally you’d have to build custom integrations to every partner, with Orderful, Emerge has connected to us once per transaction type. So instead of building hundreds of maps, say there’s 150 connections, they have to build 150 maps traditionally, they built four. They built one for the 214, one for the 990, one for the 204 and one for the 210. So we’ve simplified the integration infrastructure for them. Again, that’s from 150 potential integrations down to four. The second thing that we provide, and where our benefit is, and the reason why I started the company, is all around onboarding time. Traditionally, like Kyle mentioned, it would have taken them a year to get started with another provider. In terms of starting to trade with a new trading partner, a new partner in your supply chain, typically that takes companies about 12 weeks to accomplish. That can be a three or four month timeline, depending on who you’re working with. And the reason why that’s challenging is that in other instances of EDI there are no guarantees that your partner is going to accept your data. What that means is when you create a transaction, you email it to them, and they will respond via email with the acceptance or rejection of that transaction before you start trading live data. And the difference with Orderful is that we provide guarantees in our platform for a developer to solve those problems in real-time. What we can do is describe exactly to Kyle and his team, how they are supposed to trade with companies like Coyote or Pepsi. That description shows their developers how to get their job done. And those developers can then solve the problem in real-time with real-time feedback loops. Once they solve the problems and they solve all the validation errors in our platform, they can then begin trading live data with those partners. And there’s no lost time in communicating with those partners. So that three or four month timeline, which is traditional with other managed service providers or if you’re going to build it on your own, we’ve been able to reduce that down to nine days. The vision of the company is to take it from nine days to nine hours, and nine hours to nine minutes, and then nine minutes to nine seconds. Those are the two main points. The third big thing that Kyle and his team got is improved infrastructure. Instead of building traditional EDI maps, Orderful is a bridge for companies to adopt modern API principles when trading this legacy B2B data. Those are the three main values we provide.

Bob Bowman

Kyle, we’ve talked here about growth. I’m sure you’re looking at it in the future. How does this solution help you to so call future-proof and set your business up to continue to scale?

Kyle Jepson

We are working more deeply with our shipper customers to streamline EDI connections to not only us but several of their partners. And on the other end of that, to date, all of our EDI integrations that focus shipper facing we are going to be shifting this year to integrating with our carrier base and several large carriers. We are really excited to move from being a follower in those integrations into being a leader. And I think that’s where we’re going to see more of the advantages of the platform that Erik and his team have built. The ability to automate the testing process and really streamline your specs is incredible as you become the leader there. So we’re really excited to continue to grow that, and I see a lot of great opportunities for us to work together.

Bob Bowman

Great story about modern EDI and freight procurement. I want to thank Kyle Jepsen of Emerge and Erik Kiser of Orderful. Thanks both for talking about this really interesting case study guys. Thanks a lot.