What EDI is
EDI is a way of exchanging documents between two companies, agreed in advance. Orders, confirmations, delivery notes, invoices, all in a format the two programs understand on their own, so nobody has to re-type by hand what the other side has already written
The document does not arrive as a PDF for someone to read with their eyes, it arrives as a file built to rules set beforehand. Your business software opens it and already knows where the item code is, where the quantity is, where the delivery date is
The one asking you for it is almost always a big customer, a chain, a large client, the kind that sends a lot of orders and has no intention of handling them by writing emails one at a time
Let me say one thing straight away. Where EDI exists and has already been paid for it is the better road, sturdier than anything you could build around it, because there is nothing to interpret and that takes a whole category of errors out of the way
Anyone who tells you EDI is old stuff to be got round is telling you a story that suits them. If the channel is there, the channel is what you use
The problem is all the other customers
Setting up EDI has a cost and has to be agreed by both sides, so it makes sense when there is volume at the other end and somebody who genuinely wants that channel. For the rest of your customers the sums almost never work out
Say, just to show the reasoning and not because it is anybody's real case, that you have one big client on EDI and another twenty who keep writing to you. The orders from those twenty arrive the way they have always arrived, a PDF attached to an email, an Excel file filled in their own way, a form to download from a portal, and a person re-types them
The idea that EDI puts an end to data entry only holds for the slice of customers who have EDI. Most of the manual work sits in the long tail of small customers, who are many and will never follow you onto a structured channel
What you do where there is no EDI
That long tail needs another road, and that is exactly where Muffin Suite works. The automation reads the PDF or the Excel file or the email your customer sends, pulls out the fields that matter, opens the business software and enters them the way the person doing it today would
It works even when the program has no direct integration to use, because the automation goes through the screens, and the screens are always there
It is not EDI and it does not claim to be. EDI is an agreement between two companies, while this is something you set up on your own side without asking anybody for anything. The customer carries on sending you whatever they like, and you stop re-typing it
The checks stay in place all the same. If a value does not add up, if a code does not exist, if an amount does not reconcile, the automation stops and flags it instead of pressing on, because a wrong order entered in a hurry costs more than an order left waiting