EDI Reaches Ten Accounts. Who Reaches 300?
EDI is excellent, and it reaches almost none of your customers. The gap it leaves is where your order desk actually spends its day.
If you supply the major grocers, you have EDI. You did not choose it — they told you to build it, and you did, because they are the accounts you cannot lose.
It works. Structured orders arrive, land in the ERP, nobody types anything. For those accounts, the problem this whole market is selling against was solved decades ago.
Now count the accounts it reaches
Ten? Fifteen? And how many accounts do you have — two hundred, four hundred? The independents, the cafés, the forecourts, the single-site operators, the regional chains that never got round to it.
That is the tail. It will not be on EDI, ever, and the reason is simple economics: EDI costs the customer money and effort to implement, and returns them nothing. The majors did it because it saved them money at your expense. A café with one location will never do that arithmetic and reach yes.
The tail is where the line count is
Here is the part that gets missed. Your ten EDI accounts might be most of your revenue. They are almost never most of your order lines.
A grocery chain sends one large, clean, structured order. Three hundred independents send three hundred small, messy, unstructured ones — each needing a person to read it, match it, price it and key it. Your order desk's workload does not track revenue. It tracks orders. And EDI touches almost none of them.
Why the portal did not fill the gap
Because a portal has the same shape as EDI: it moves the work to the customer and gives them nothing back. It is EDI with a nicer interface and the same adoption problem. That is why you rolled one out and why most of the tail still emails you.
The gap is a different problem
EDI and portals both try to make the customer send structured data. For the tail, that fight is unwinnable — not because those customers are difficult, but because they are rational and you have no leverage.
The alternative is to accept the order as sent and do the structuring yourself. It is harder to build and much easier to sell, because nobody outside your business has to agree to anything.
Keep EDI. It is not going anywhere and it should not. Just stop pretending it covers your order desk, because it never did.
If you supply the major grocers, you have EDI. You did not choose it — they told you to build it, and you did, because they are the accounts you cannot lose.
It works. Structured orders arrive, land in the ERP, nobody types anything. For those accounts, the problem this whole market is selling against was solved decades ago.
Now count the accounts it reaches
Ten? Fifteen? And how many accounts do you have — two hundred, four hundred? The independents, the cafés, the forecourts, the single-site operators, the regional chains that never got round to it.
That is the tail. It will not be on EDI, ever, and the reason is simple economics: EDI costs the customer money and effort to implement, and returns them nothing. The majors did it because it saved them money at your expense. A café with one location will never do that arithmetic and reach yes.
The tail is where the line count is
Here is the part that gets missed. Your ten EDI accounts might be most of your revenue. They are almost never most of your order lines.
A grocery chain sends one large, clean, structured order. Three hundred independents send three hundred small, messy, unstructured ones — each needing a person to read it, match it, price it and key it. Your order desk's workload does not track revenue. It tracks orders. And EDI touches almost none of them.
Why the portal did not fill the gap
Because a portal has the same shape as EDI: it moves the work to the customer and gives them nothing back. It is EDI with a nicer interface and the same adoption problem. That is why you rolled one out and why most of the tail still emails you.
The gap is a different problem
EDI and portals both try to make the customer send structured data. For the tail, that fight is unwinnable — not because those customers are difficult, but because they are rational and you have no leverage.
The alternative is to accept the order as sent and do the structuring yourself. It is harder to build and much easier to sell, because nobody outside your business has to agree to anything.
Keep EDI. It is not going anywhere and it should not. Just stop pretending it covers your order desk, because it never did.