For over 90 years, Erich Jaeger has designed and manufactured high-quality electrical connectors for various industries. The business employs more than 1,000 people.

Challenge

Wasting Hours Manually Investigating EDI Issues

Erich Jaeger depends on EDI integrations to automate and accelerate critical transactions with business partners, particularly in the areas of order management and dispatch. While digitizing data exchange had made the business more efficient, their former EDI vendor was falling short of its requirements. Everything seemed okay on the surface. EDIs were in place for a variety of critical partner communications, including receiving orders, order confirmations, shipment notifications, and invoices. But increasingly, Erich Jaeger was seeing:

• Unacceptably high error rates across both sent and received EDI
• A lack of visibility into how the vendor processed and managed EDI

This was bad for business. For a start, it was costing busy EDI Manager, Gerald Baudek, wasted time and resource. The vendor provided no clear dashboard to monitor transactions. So when a partner called to say a message hadn’t been received, Gerald had to manually dig through a dense database to provide an answer. Resolving a single issue took up to two hours!

As a business that prides itself on excellent supplier and retailer relationships, Gerald was frustrated. The former vendor’s subpar service made it tougher to onboard new partners and caused delays and friction with existing ones. Gerald’s frustration only deepened when the vendor delivered an ultimatum: pay double for a new product, or lose support for their existing one.

He says: “At that point in time, we knew we had to look for a different provider. Weresearched four or five companies providing this kind of service. And in the end, we selected eddyson.”

Solution

Sending and Receiving Data Reliably - and Tracing Any Message in Minutes

It takes a leap of faith to implement new technology. To reduce any risk of disruption, eddyson provided Erich Jaeger with a dedicated customer support expert. Gerald says: “Our dedicated person at eddyson helped us do all the implementations we needed step-by-step and in good speed.”

Initially, eddyson worked with Erich Jaeger to ensure all their EDI requirements were seamlessly implemented. Experienced technical experts carefully and accurately digitized all the processes that are critical to their partner relationships—from order entry to distribution of purchase orders, payment confirmations, inventory documents, and invoices.

Next, eddyson used state-of-the art technology to convert wildly different technical requirements and processing rules from Erich Jaeger’s various retail partners and suppliers into one simple format. With eddyson’s solutions in place, information was processed faster and with superior accuracy than before. It was easy to add new partners—and the business could start pursuing new business opportunities with even more confidence.

Complex Integrations Made Easy

eddyson leverages a customized mapping strategy to complete even the most complex implementations—and at a speed many vendors can’t compete with. In one example, eddyson stepped up to the plate when a partner switched from an order process based on forecasts to sending just-in-time (JIT) calls. This meant that one or more quantities and dates within an order were transmitted all in one call.

Gerald explains: “We were receiving hundreds of instructions at the same time, which was complicated to design. I had a really creative cooperation with eddyson to map the relevant messages so that everything was in the right document to reflect the customer’s requirements in our system."

Thanks to eddyson’s expertise, the EDI now comes into Erich Jaeger’s system without anyone having to do anything—or worry about it—saving them time and disruption: “With good partnership with eddyson we fulfilled a hundred percent of the customer’s requirements and ensured we have very little effort on our side every day,” Gerald says.

While transaction errors are now rare, Gerald appreciates that if there is an issue, eddyson’s platform gives him total visibility into what happened and when: I can choose a specific timescale to analyze and filter specific message types or partners. I can analyze very quickly, and very well, if there is a misunderstanding, or if there was an issue on the customer or the provider side. It’s a really clear monitor that saves me a lot of time," he explains.