Customer orders that EDI does not cover
· 2 minute read · Tim
EDI fits the large trading partners who already send it. The rest of a distributor’s book still arrives as a PDF. Here is how to handle that half.
EDI is how a large retailer sends you a purchase order as structured data. It is the right pipe when that customer already has it. It does not cover the rest of the book: the independents, the smaller chains, and the trade accounts who email a PDF and will keep emailing a PDF.
EDI is for the partners who already send it
In Australia and New Zealand, EDI is how the major retailers trade. Pronto Xi’s own EDI notes list incoming purchase orders among the documents, and name retailers such as Coles, Woolworths Group, and David Jones as the kind of partner the connection is built for. If those orders are a share of your volume, you already know the VAN, the maps, and the cost of being on it.
That project does not shrink the other inbox. A distributor can be live with three banner groups and still key forty other customers by hand before lunch.
What teams do with everyone else
A thread on r/SupplyChainLogistics asks how people handle orders that are not EDI: PDFs, spreadsheets, and email. The replies are honest. Manual entry, then an approval, then the order can be picked. When one partner’s PDF is stable and the volume is high, someone extracts a batch to Excel and uploads a CSV. One-off orders stay on the keyboard. A few teams point smaller customers at a tool that accepts a fixed order form by email. Several say the errors do not show up when the order is keyed. They show up in fulfilment, which is the expensive moment.
Forcing the small accounts onto EDI, or onto your portal, moves the work onto them. Some will do it. Most will send the PDF anyway, and you will key it so you do not lose the order.
Two pipes, not one project
- Keep EDI for the trading partners who send it. OrderWiz is not an EDI network and does not replace that connection.
- Take the emailed and uploaded purchase orders through a review, then post the sales order into the same ERP.
- Leave the customer’s habit alone. They keep sending the PO the way they send it today.
That second pipe is email order entry: forward the PDF, map the lines, check the price, confirm, post. The customers who will never join your EDI program still get a clean sales order. Your team stops being the integration.
If this is how orders still land on your team, tell us how they come in.
Written by Tim, who built OrderWiz after working in wholesale distribution.
