Customers are demanding, and wield a lot of control over your operations by the nature of customers = sales. Vendors often get overlooked as an area that can be optimized to save cost and increase efficiencies. Specifically, enabling EDI with your vendor can lead to less manual entry, more accurate data in your system and a smoother relationship with your vendors. Let’s look at this process in more detail.

Vendor Transactions for your SAP EDI Interface

1. Purchase Order Creation (EDI 850)

   Right now, you might be sending your vendor an automated e-mail when a purchase order is created. They would then have to key this into their system manually. Utilizing EDI in this interface will get your order into their system quicker and more accurately.

2. Purchase Order Acknowledgment (EDI 855)

   With the order in their system, an automatic acknowledgment can be generated and sent back to you much faster than in a manual world. From your end, this can be processed into SAP and automatically update the expected delivery dates on the PO and bring to the buyers attention any discrepancies in price. You will see this acknowledgment reflected on the confirmation tab at the item level.

3. Advance Ship Notice (EDI 856)

   The same transaction that can be a pain to get right for customers suddenly becomes a huge time saver for you when received from your vendors. First, it will give you a finalized date for receipt, which once updated on your PO can feed MRP and allow you to better plan for inventory to be available to production or for shipment to customers. Automating this with EDI leads to an immediate reflection of the data. Second, you can receive the palettization information from your vendor as to how the product is arriving. Integrate this with RF Scanning on your unloading dock and you’ve just optimized your receiving process.

4. Invoice (EDI 810)

   Do you have your AP team spending hours manually entering invoices from your vendors? There is a better way. Receiving the EDI invoice will have it automatically come into SAP and create the vendor invoice. This does still follow any rules you have set in place such as GR requirements, or 3-way match. You can also choose to park all invoices for manual review before payment if you choose.

   
   

   Whether you implement all 4 of the most common vendor EDI transactions, or only a few – you are guaranteed to streamline your inbound process, reduce manual work and improve data accuracy.

   
   
   
   
   About the author: Jodi Abrams
   
   Jodi is an expert in SAP and eCommerce integration, and is Vice President of Applications for CONTAX.