Reduce administrative costs: EDI vs. email. When is it time to change?

They say time is money. But what if you're also losing time and unnecessary costs due to inefficient communication with suppliers? If you're still processing orders, invoices, or delivery notes manually from emails, it might be time for a change.

Let's look at the cases when it pays to switch to EDI - electronic data interchange - and what specific savings this step will bring you.

Email is a good servant, but...

Imagine the situation: An order arrives by email. Someone has to download it, open it, check it, rewrite it into the ERP, check it again, send a confirmation. Then the delivery notes and invoices arrive. And it all happens over and over again – day after day.

All it takes is one typo in the item number, a wrongly entered price, or a forgotten item of goods, and an error occurs, leading to complaints, credit notes, or delayed delivery.

Email communication works, but its capacity and reliability have their limits. If the administrative burden is starting to get too much for you, EDI is the logical next step.

What is EDI anyway?

EDI , or Electronic Data Interchange, is an efficient way for companies to exchange business documents – orders, invoices, delivery notes and more – directly between their information systems. No paper, no retyping, no errors.

Simply put, an order created in the customer's system is automatically transferred to the supplier's system. The same applies to an invoice or delivery note. Documents thus "travel" electronically, securely and, most importantly, efficiently.

Why are companies switching from email to EDI?

For the same reason why you drive to work instead of taking a horse-drawn carriage and why everyone uses a mobile phone instead of a landline these days – because it makes life easier every day. It would be a sin not to take advantage of a modern solution full of undeniable advantages, which is also fully available to you.

So what are the main advantages of EDI?

Saving on administration costs

• You will get rid of manual rewriting.
• You will save staff time and reduce the need to hire additional people as your business grows.
• You will reduce printing, paper and physical archiving costs.

Fewer errors and complaints

• Automatic document transfer minimizes errors.
• Fewer credit notes, fewer complaints and less burden.

Faster document processing

• Orders, delivery notes and invoices flow in minutes, not hours or days.
• The receipt of goods, invoicing and the ordering process are accelerated.

Cash flow improvement

• Faster invoicing and document confirmation results in smoother cash flow.

Security and regulatory compliance

• Everything runs on proven services from cloud giants such as Amazon (AWS) or Windows (Azure), which guarantees maximum protection of customer data.
• Data is insured, regularly backed up, GDPR compliant, and only accessible to authorized users.
• The transmission is encrypted and electronically signed.
• The documents have full legal value and are securely archived.

Additionally, our comprehensive electronic data interchange solutionORiON EDI supports international EDI standards such as EANCOM, UN/EDIFACT and ISDOC, so we can exchange documents across different systems and markets without any worries. ORiON EDI is compatible with over 160 ERP systems, including major players such as SAP, Pohoda, Money and Abra, ensuring automatic data transfer directly into your system without manual intervention.

When is it worth switching to EDI?

The key question is not whether to replace email with EDI, but when. When is email no longer enough and blocking the healthy development of a company? The answer is relatively simple.

If you exchange more than a few dozen documents with business partners per month, EDI becomes clearly more efficient than email.

Typically, switching to EDI pays off in the following situations:

• You want to effectively exploit all available company data
• You are preparing for expansion, expanding your supplier portfolio.
• You need to better plan capacities and orders with large customers.
• You want to optimize and develop the supply process - e.g. distribution centers.
• The company is growing and the administrative team can't keep up.
• You want to eliminate errors and complaints.
• You need faster receipt of goods or invoicing.

And how much does it actually cost?

You may be surprised to learn that EDI is no longer an expensive technology “only for big companies.” On the contrary, our current cloud-based solution, ORiON EDI, is affordable even for much smaller companies.

Operating costs for ORiON for suppliers typically range from a few hundred to thousands. For ORiON for customers, the price depends on several factors, but is most often in the thousands or tens of thousands.

Some companies will feel the savings immediately within the first weeks or months, which is possible thanks to the fact that we can fully deploy ORiON for suppliers within 2-3 days.

Save with EDI too

Let's summarize: If your company operates in industries such as retail, logistics or e-commerce, and you still operate on the basis of emails and manual transcription, it is very likely that switching to EDI will bring you:

• Saving money that you can allocate to new projects, for example
• Saving time that you can use much more productively and meaningfully
• Less error rate and with that also less stress

If you're still unsure, we're happy to help you make a decision. We offer suppliers a free consultation to answer all your questions, and customers can pay for an initial analysis where we map your processes together, focus on the overall efficiency of the company, and calculate the specific savings that EDI would bring you.

Contact us . We'll meet in person or online and discuss how EDI can help reduce costs in your company.