Future-proofing your operations: EDI strategies for the next 12 months

As the end of the year approaches, many businesses are turning their attention to 2025. Planning for growth, looking at ways to improve, and finding smarter ways to scale. One area that’s often overlooked in this process is your electronic data interchange set up. If you’re relying on electronic data interchange (EDI) to connect with suppliers, customers or partners, now’s the perfect time to ask: Is your EDI setup ready for what’s next?

Here are some practical EDI strategies you can put in place now to future-proof your operations for the year ahead.

1. Review your current EDI setup

Start with a quick audit:

• Are all your key trading partners connected via EDI?
• Are you still relying on any manual workarounds or PDFs?
• Do your systems handle all required documents (e.g. POs, ASNs, invoices)?
• Is your EDI solution cloud-based and easy to maintain?

Identifying gaps now helps you avoid issues during busy periods and sets you up to onboard new partners or channels more easily next year.

2. Upgrade legacy systems

If your EDI system is still running on local servers or relies on custom code, it might be time to modernise. Think about whether your system is currently:

• easy to integrate with your ERP and finance systems
• automatically updates and needs improved security
• able to provide real-time monitoring and reporting
• flexible enough for your business to grow.

Modernising doesn’t mean starting from scratch. You can often keep what works and upgrade only what’s holding you back.

3. Simplify supplier onboarding

If you’re planning to add more suppliers in the coming year, especially small ones, offer them a simple way to connect. You could use a free EDI web portal to onboard suppliers who don’t have their own EDI systems. Our web portal solution, Colladium, is free for your community to use. It speeds up onboarding, reduces manual emails and ensures your data stays clean.

4. Explore hybrid EDI/API solutions

APIs are playing a growing role in supply chain integration, especially for real-time data like inventory, pricing or order tracking. In the coming year, it could be worth looking at systems in your organisation using API and incorporating that with your EDI setup. Our Gateway solution give customers one central connection between systems, mediating between systems, connection protocols, file formats and trading partners/businesses. It can bring a lot of benefits including:

• full visibility of data exchange activity
• the ability to transform and manipulate data
• ability to see errors and act, or build in escalation processes.

5. Get ahead of compliance changes

With eInvoicing standards like PEPPOL becoming more widely adopted in Australia and New Zealand, it’s worth reviewing your invoice process to be compliant. Government agencies are paying suppliers faster when using eInvoicing and we could see more business following too.

6. Use EDI data to drive insights

EDI isn’t just about moving documents; it’s also a rich source of business data. It’s worth thinking about the data you are getting from EDI and how to utilise it for reporting like:

• Analysing supplier performance
• Identifying common delays or errors
• Improving order accuracy and fill rates
• Forecasting demand more accurately