CHRIS: Good question. One of the interesting things here is that you can see that this industry has evolved just this space overall. And it's really become capable of doing literally most if not everything that you see with other API formats. And although it's not mechanically true that a car can become an airplane in the same way EDI isn't going to become an API. You know, there are certain limitations, but I guess you can put wings on to a car, can't you? If you need to.
The big thing I would say without getting into super, super-detailed edge cases would be being able to get mechanical acknowledgment of the documents sent and receipt of documents. If you've sent something and it's been received, then you're a recipient of a document. This allows this real-time lightweight communication like a PUB/SUB (publish and) or a service bus. Mechanically within the organization or eCommerce platform, these acknowledgments around purchase order acknowledgment, a shipment notice, possibly a warehouse transfer notification, things like that, where this is going to be driven off of different events so you can have an event-driven workflow that's going to occur.
By properly setting this up with the notifications, you can basically allow the computer systems, whether it's a VAN or if it's an AS2 or whatever mechanism is going to allow this communication to happen within the EDI network, then you're able to allow your systems to follow these rules and take advantage of these different notifications to communicate with each other where it would otherwise be people physically communicating in some form right.
There can be an order placed online for a store that is in the southeast region of the country. But the item is only available in the warehouse, that's in the northwest part of the country. And so there needs to be a transfer, and maybe it's a weekly transfer that occurs. That's just part of the fulfillment network that, hey, if anything needs to go from northwest to southeast every week, we're going to do that, especially if it's a large order or associated with a buyers group.
And so someone places this order online, and little do they know that all they're seeing is the lead time saying their item will be in the store in a week. But what happens behind the scenes? Well, the order gets credited to the store that’s close to the person that's buying online. They're going to pick it up in the store and that store gets the credit within the accounting system. But there's also a transfer of the inventory, possibly from the warehouse that's in the northwest down to the warehouse that's in the southeast.
And let's say for whatever reason, that person cancels their order after the item has already been transferred. Okay, well, now what are you going to do? You have all these systems playing together. And so you really want to take advantage of notifications because we need to account for the fact that the northwest warehouse transferred the inventory to the southeast warehouse. So now it's in the inventory in the southeast warehouse.
We also have an order cancelation, so we need to deal with that, and we need to make sure that the store that was getting credit for the order doesn't get credit for it. And on and on we go. The notifications can really be seen as sort of an automation if we're watching them properly and executing against them properly, they're like essentially a eCommerce workflow that we can fire off from these notifications.
I would just say whenever you're looking for a vendor and you're considering your options, make sure that you look for someone who has experience in your particular area. And if you're going to be leveraging some specific details like you're going to be working with EDI, with an eCommerce, for example, or the health care industry, HIPAA websites, for example, it really does make sense to work with someone who has done this and been there and done that before in your particular space. And they can bring in these different capabilities and experiences from successfully implementing what is possible with EDI.
Don't be afraid to consider really looking at it as well as a long-term investment. A lot of times what we see with clients, even those looking for a group buying platform, is they will just halfway get started into something like EDI thinking that it's just this one thing that we need and then they'll still be using it five-to-ten years later. We really want to encourage you to look at it as a potential long-term investment, even if that doesn't end up being the case, look at it as an investment that might go for five-to-ten years, and make sure that you put the planning in upfront so that you can execute really well. And just be aware of some of the potential opportunities and potential risks going into it.
I think that's a great segue into our next talks, as we're going to be helping really get into the weeds on those in some of our next discussions. So with that, that's it for me.
RON: For the audience, thanks again for attending today. If you enjoyed today's webinar, please smash that like button, subscribe to the channel. As a reminder, this EDI Buying Group webinar today was number three in a series of 12 webinars about buying groups. So make sure to check the channel, check the playlists for buying groups in all the other chapters.
I'll also try to directly link to all the other videos in this series in the description. So look down in description below for the URLs that Chris talked about, the different formats, the different websites, and then at the very bottom of the description, all the other chapters. So thanks again.
CHRIS: Thanks, Ron.
RON: Appreciate ya. Thanks, Chris.
CHRIS: Thanks, everyone. Bye for now.