Bucks, Nickels and Dimes! What Do You In point of fact Save With EDI?
In 2010, GS1 UK commissioned Professor Richard Wilding of the Cranfield School of Business Management to carry out a report on EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) with regard to the UK retail sector. Professor Wilding and his team performed exhaustive research and highlighted in great detail all the advantages that are normally associated with EDI: It’s faster, data is more accurate, improved process efficiencies, cost savings and it eliminates paper. He also went one step further; he put the savings associated with switching from manual, paper-based processing to EDI processing into a monetary format (and even broke it down into separate sectors – Order, Invoice, ASN). For the purpose of ease and accuracy I have converted the reports Sterling values into US Dollars. These are the savings Professor Wilding and his team at Cranfield School of Business Management calculated:
| Orders | $23.00 | ||
| Invoices | $14.00 | ||
| Despatch Advice (ASN) | $19.00 | ||
| TOTAL: | $56.00 |
As can be seen from the above, by switching from a manual paper based transaction to EDI you can save your organization $56.00 per transaction in dollars, nickel and dimes. To put this in real terms, if your organization was processing 50 orders per month, and with each order a matching invoice and ASN was required, your organization would be making savings of $2,800 per month by switching from paper to EDI. Obviously the savings are much greater the more transactions your organization makes.
