Leave Those Poor IT Guys Alone: How to Avoid EDI Backlog Purgatory and Move Your Business Forward

IT managers, we feel your pain. Every so often, you come across a day in which all of your good intentions and plans are thrown aside to complete mission-critical tasks for the teams you support— it happens to everyone. Before you know it, your backlog of tasks becomes so long that you can barely stand the sight of it, let alone figure out a path towards remedying it.

Hire another development resource? That’s not in the budget. Lock yourself away to focus? Nice try.

So how do you work through your backlog with existing headcount while maximizing the resources you do have? The answer lies within the tools you have to support you and your team.

With Syncrofy, you can get the most out of your team and minimize the time it takes to answer EDI-related questions. Time-taxing inquires that would normally take up to an hour to research and execute can now be done in a matter of minutes.

Syncrofy’s intuitive self-service functionality allows you to stay on top of your partners and questions about sent and received documents without having to enlist the help of your IT department.

One of the easiest ways to ensure whether or not a document was sent is to utilize Syncrofy’s “Watch” tool (part of the Timeline feature). With other EDI tools, you’d most likely have to check on a question like this manually, multiple times throughout the day with a member of your IT team. But with Syncrofy, it’s as easy as “set it and forget it.”

Watch allows you to monitor a specific Timeline (or document) and receive an alert when there’s a change to that Timeline. For example, you might be trying to find out if an advance ship notice or invoice went out for a particular document. Rather than continuously asking your IT department (in addition to getting on their nerves), you’ll just get a real-time notification when it’s sent out. That’s a huge time-saver and it helps eliminate questions as to whether a document was sent or received.

Syncrofy not only enables you to take tasks off your IT team’s plate, but it enables business users to complete those tasks and answer those EDI-related questions on their own.

Let’s say you’re a business user on the phone with a customer and they have a question about an EDI document. With Syncrofy, you can easily find the answer right then and there with the customer on the phone.

The alternative is telling the customer you’ll get back to them after you talk to someone in the EDI department, something that could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days. And if you’re in a larger organization, “talk” means sending an email to the help desk or being put in a queue. Over time, those inquiries and questions can accumulate and cause you AND your EDI department to be stuck with no end in sight.

Syncrofy also allows you to set up proactive alerts and notifications to catch potential problems within your data before they become larger issues so you’re not constantly spending your time doing damage control. Tasks like confirming receipt of an invoice, ensuring a purchase order was sent, or identifying an exception to a late shipment are all processes that can be monitored by Syncrofy.

Imagine receiving an alert that a document was late, allowing you to re-send before you’re hit with a chargeback or fine? That’s being proactive and saving your company money.

And don’t forget about Syncrofy’s powerful search features that allow you find exactly what you’re looking for no matter how much (or how little) supporting information you may have.

That’s true self-service power.

To learn more about the power of Syncrofy and what it can do for your business, visit www.syncrofy.com.