Web-based Edi Services for Small and Medium Range Businesses

Most of the back office work of today can be outsourced today. This enables companies to concentrate on their core competencies. Of all the back office works, exchange of secured data has always been a challenge especially for small and medium range companies. With the advent of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) things have changed dramatically.

Businesses are no longer dependent on snail mail to send or receive Purchase orders, acknowledgments, advanced shipping notices, invoices, payment advices, request for quotes, and any other transactions, which is highly expensive and time consuming.

Although EDI makes transactions faster and cheaper, the initial investments in EDI soft ware and hard ware are bit high for small and medium range businesses. Unless these business keep up in pace, they could be out dated and lose charm in keeping up relationships. Then how do small and medium range businesses utilize the modern technology to bring down costs and improve efficiency? This is where the EDI providers give a helping hand to them. Web-based EDI providers can very well cater to the needs of these businesses. The greatest advantage of hosted EDI services is that small and medium range business need not invest in costly EDI software or hardware, instead hire the service providers’ tools at an affordable cost.

As these EDI interfaces are easy to use on any PC, businesses only need to be connected to the internet to utilize this amazing facility for a trivial fee. A simple search in the internet could give you an idea of services and fee structure of the web-based EDI providers. CovalentWorks is one such leading EDI service provider. The company with its wide range of services provides a helping hand to small and medium range business in modernizing their transaction methods. There are three types of standard services offered by this service provider and they are as follows:

- An on-line, web-based EDI solution

- An integrated EDI solution for automatic data entry/export

- A stand-alone EDI VAN service

The online hosted EDI solution is best fit for companies that process small to medium volumes of EDI transactions. With no software or hardware requirements, companies and become EDI compliant in a jiffy. All they need is a PC with internet connection.

The integrated EDI solution has the option of automatic data entry/export facility that eliminates manual data entry and is ideal for businesses that send and receive high volumes of EDI transactions. This also has the facility to translate files received in various formats so that it can be used for automatic data entry and export in the current format used by businesses.

The stand alone EDI VAN service can be availed by businesses capable of working with raw EDI data using their own EDI software. This service comes at no additional cost.

As hosted EDI services eliminates the heavy investments in software installations, up gradation, document format translation, mapping file names, additional servers, and the like it is the best option for small and medium rage businesses.