EDI Transportation

by Ray Atia, ratia@amosoft.com

EDI being used by several industries around the world and more and more industries discover and implement EDI to speed up business transactions. Like Mr. Bill Gates called his book "Business @ speed of Thought", EDI help industries to make business at speed of light.
Thanks to computer technology, today companies can exchange business transaction quickly and also help retailers to know in advanced what to delivery to expect, save time & money.

The shipper send an EDI document (we call it transaction set in the EDI language) of a load tenders to the transportation carrier and in response it gets back a load tender. Then another EDI document enables the customer to check on the shipment status.
In less then half an hour the customer get an Acknowledge EDI documents accepting or rejecting the load. This gives the customer (retailer or broker) an option to plan the warehouse inventory and decide on which action to take until that shipment arrive and how to work with customers who wants to purchase products in this shipment.
Knowing when shipment will arrive is a huge factor to manufacture, suppliers and retailers because they can plan human resources, and time slot for different actions that they need to take in order to execute different task on their daily operation and being competitive as much as they can.

Transportation can be done by boats, air-planes, trucks, mail, companies who deliver supply same-day or overnight as needed. In many cases receiving the shipment a day earlier can give the business an advantage over competitor and in some cases companies will be willing to pay more money just to get a head in line in order to have the supply early. An example would be just before the holiday season.
Since most transportation companies have limited resources, planning in advanced and being able to book them early will give the company an edge and will promise delivery on time.

Mobile applications became common and enable distributors to find out the destinations using GPS and communicate with their offices remotely. It also enables the people in office to find out where is the truck on every given moment and decide on different actions upon changes, cancellations and any other factor that they need to take into account. It also let the distributors update their sender upon delivery or problems they run into like can't find the person who needs to sign on the shipment or doesn't want to sign on the shipment, missing items on the truck, broken items on the truck. Those distributors can update the shipment status remotely and give the company they represent most accurate information about delivery status. Because cell-phones became so powerful it can run applications that communicate with their parent ERP applications and be synchronized constantly. The ability to be constantly synchronized with the distributors is a major advantage and today more and more companies develop their own mobile solution to interact with their ERP system so they can have the advantage over their competitors.
An EDI system or EDI service that can interact with mobile application will become an advantage as well because companies who provide EDI Services will be able to send back to their customer accurate information about delivery and update their EDI systems with latest information on deliveries, cancellations and returns.

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