Two orders arrive on a Monday morning. The first comes from your biggest customer, straight from their purchasing system into your ERP. It’s already structured, the product codes are yours, and nobody touches it.
The second is a PDF attached to an email from a smaller customer, using their own product codes, with a delivery note typed into the body of the email. Someone on your team opens it, works out what the customer means, looks up the codes and prices, and types it in.
EDI vs order automation
The first order in our fictional scenario elucidated above came through EDI (electronic data interchange): two businesses’ systems exchanging orders directly, in an agreed structured format, set up customer by customer.
The second one is the gap order automation fills. Order automation refers to software that reads orders in whatever format they arrive, checks them against your ERP and creates the sales order, with no change needed on the customer’s side.
You use EDI for your largest, most regular customers, especially the ones who already trade by EDI or require it, and use order automation for everyone else. Most suppliers need both, because the two cover different customers.
That difference decides where each one fits. EDI works well once it’s in situ, but it only reaches customers willing and able to connect. Order automation reaches the rest, and for many suppliers that’s most customers (even if it’s not most of the revenue).
What EDI does well, and where it stops
With EDI, your customer’s purchasing system sends an order straight to yours in a standard format, so nobody reads or types it.
In the UK and Europe the common standard is EDIFACT, and many large retailers and manufacturers use EDI with their regular suppliers. Some require it.
For the right customer, it works very well. Orders arrive structured and complete, the volume is high and predictable, and once the connection is running it needs little attention.
The catch (and there’s always a catch) is the setup. Each EDI connection is a project between you and one customer: agreeing the format, mapping fields to your ERP, testing, and often paying a provider to carry the messages.
That’s worth it for a customer who sends you hundreds of orders a month. It’s rarely worth it for one who sends five, and smaller customers usually don’t have the systems or the appetite to connect at all.
This isn’t a new issue either. As far back as 2001 (a quarter of a century ago!), Computerworld’s Mark Hall reported that 80% of the companies supplying carmakers directly had EDI links with them.
Among those companies’ own suppliers, though, the figure fell to 30%, and one step further down the chain, it was just 2%. While the tools have moved on since, the pattern hasn’t: EDI covers the top of a supply chain well and peters out quickly below it.
What order automation does
Order automation picks up where EDI stops. Your customers keep ordering exactly as they do now, by email, as a PDF, a spreadsheet, a Word document or even a photo – and the software does the reading and typing your team does today.
In practice, that means four steps:
- The order is captured as it arrives, from the inbox, an upload or an API.
- The order is read down to line level. Customer, products, quantities, prices and delivery address.
- Everything is checked against your ERP. Whether the customer is recognised, whether each product code exists, whether the price matches the contract or price list.
- Orders that pass create a sales order in your ERP. Anything that doesn’t goes to the right person, with the problem already flagged.
Without it, someone opens each order, works out what the customer means, looks up codes and prices, and types it all into the ERP. As a worked example, if each order takes 15 minutes and you handle 500 non-EDI orders a month, that’s around 1,500 hours of keying a year.
At a typical UK salary, that’s roughly the cost of one full-time person, before you count the errors that typing introduces.
EDI vs order automation at a glance
| EDI | Order automation | |
| How orders arrive | Structured data, system to system | PDFs, spreadsheets, Word documents, emails, images |
| What the customer has to do | Set up and maintain a connection with you | Nothing. They order as they do now |
| Setup | One project per customer | Set up once on your side, then works across customers |
| Best for | Large, regular, high-volume customers | Smaller, newer or irregular customers, and anyone who won’t connect by EDI |
| What still needs a person | Very little, once running | Exceptions, such as an unknown product code or a price that doesn’t match |
Which customers need which
Go through your customers and sort them into three groups.
- Keep or set up EDI for customers who already trade by EDI or require it, and for any customer whose volumes are high and steady enough to justify a connection project. These tend to be your largest accounts.
- Use order automation for everyone who sends orders by email, as attachments or in the body of the message. That includes smaller customers, new customers, customers with occasional or seasonal orders, and customers who simply won’t invest in EDI. For most suppliers, this is the long tail of the customer list.
- Review the rest. Orders taken by phone or through a sales rep can usually be uploaded and processed the same way as emailed orders, instead of being typed in from notes. And customers on a portal or spreadsheet upload can often go through order automation too.
If you’re unsure where a customer sits, you should ask these two questions:
- How many orders they send a month?
- How much does each order vary?
High and steady points to EDI. Low, varied or unpredictable points to order automation. If most orders need a new product code, check what can be automated before you start.
Running both side by side
EDI and order automation aren’t competing. They’re complementary. They feed the same place, your ERP, from different directions.
What makes them work together is shared master data: the customer accounts, product codes, prices and delivery addresses both check against. That’s also where most of the effort goes.
Before you automate non-EDI orders, check three things in your ERP:
- Customer part numbers. Customers often order using their own product codes, not yours. You’ll need a cross-reference between their codes and yours, so each order can be matched without someone looking it up. EDI customers usually have this mapping already. Your customer ordering via email probably won’t.
You don’t need a complete cross-reference on day one. With order automation, an unknown code is flagged; someone maps it once, and every future order using it is matched without anyone stepping in. The mapping builds up as orders arrive, and it stops living in one person’s head.
- Prices. Customer-specific prices, contract rates and promotions need to be recorded in the ERP, so the price on each order can be checked against what you agreed.
- Delivery addresses. Regular delivery addresses should be set up against each account, not typed in each time.
This is the least exciting part of the project, and it’s the part that decides how many orders go straight through without anyone touching them.
Where to start with order automation
Map how orders reach you today before you change anything. List each channel (email attachments, email body, uploads, EDI, and phone or sales reps), with the rough monthly volume and who handles it. Most teams find more variety than they expected.
Then start with the channel that has the most volume and the most keying. For most suppliers, that’s PDF and spreadsheet orders arriving by email.
Pilot with a handful of high-volume customers whose orders are regular and whose data is clean, run it alongside your current process for a short while, and compare time per order, error rate and exceptions before you expand.
The number to watch is your straight-through rate: the share of orders that reach your ERP with nobody touching them.
How Webexpenses Order Management handles the orders EDI doesn’t
Webexpenses Order Management, part of the Webexpenses FinOps platform powered by Zudello, is built for the orders that arrive outside EDI. Your EDI customers can carry on as they are, or their orders can run through the same queue as everyone else’s.
Either way, Order Management takes care of the orders that arrive outside EDI.
- Orders are captured as they arrive. Orders emailed in, sent by API or uploaded by your sales team are collected in one place, whether they’re PDFs, Excel or Word files, CSVs or images.
- Customer codes are mapped to yours. Different customers use different codes for the same product. Order Management maps them to your internal product codes, so orders go through without anyone looking codes up by hand.
- Prices are checked on arrival. Each order is checked against your ERP, with customer discounts, contract rates and promotional pricing applied, so it goes through at the rate you agreed. A wrong price or an unknown product code is caught before it reaches your ERP or your warehouse.
- Exceptions go to the right person. Unusual quantities, pricing exceptions or new customers are routed for approval. Everything else goes straight through.
- Sales orders are created in your ERP. Order data syncs with your ERP in real time. Order Management works with leading ERPs, including Sage Intacct, NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics.
- It’s built for the people who handle orders. Sales, customer service and operations get an interface and training designed for them, not just for finance.
The result is that your team stops keying orders and starts handling the exceptions: the handful of orders that genuinely need a person.
Every business takes orders differently. That’s why we start with a conversation, not a demo. Book a discovery call and we’ll talk through how orders reach you today, where they slow down and what a fix would need to do.
