“SaaS EDI companies provide you with a service based entirely on the principle that you pay for what you use.”
About EDI
Software as a Service EDI Hubs
With the advent of the Internet, a new way of providing EDI services has arisen. It is known by many names, ‘Software as a Service (SaaS); ‘Outsourced EDI’; ‘Shared Service Centres’ to name but a few. Different names but these services all offer the same basic solution: they will roll out EDI to your trading partners for you. This is the solution provided by SCD.
SaaS EDI companies provide you with a service based entirely on the principle that you pay for what you use and no more. Some providers will charge based on the number of transactions, some on a flat fee per trading partner and message type, but the basic principle holds that you pay for what you use. No licence fees, no server hosting.
This gives you an advantage straight away. It allows you to dip your toe in the ocean of EDI - for example, allowing you to try out, say, messaging to five trading partners to gain experience of EDI in practice before you commit further. You will need no capital expenditure outlay and will have a proof of concept. It also allows you to start with, and pay for, only one type of message type (say, the transmission of transport requests) and develop it gradually (for example, by rolling out POD messages from your suppliers later, followed by exceptions data from their telematics systems).
As a SaaS EDI provider SCD’s expertise is in the ‘translation’ of message format from one partner to another, allowing all parties to work in their chosen format. As we specialise in the logistics and supply chain markets, when we add a new customer some of the trading partners are likely to be common with an existing partner. This reduces the workload associated with integrating this partner and creates a virtual ‘hub’ of many-to-many relationships. Each customer only pays for the connections to their own partners but the cost of this integration is reduced because the links can be used for more than one relationship as shown below:
