Fashion industry, to describe in the simplest form, is the business of making clothes. However, this illustration does not justice the clear distinction between clothing, fashion, and apparel. While apparel is functional clothing, fashion incorporates its own prejudices of style and individual taste to apparel. To take it to a further level, the fashion apparel industry is evolving at a rapid pace, especially over the last two decades. Highly changing dynamics of the industry have forced fashion apparel retailers to desire flexible designs, higher quality, and low cost. Meanwhile, apparel EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is becoming a widely accepted practice for fashion and apparel manufacturers and wholesalers to remain competitive in an increasingly demanding global marketplace.
Let’s take a look at how apparel EDI is changing the world of the fashion industry.
EDI, as the name suggests, is the electronic interchange of structured data according to agreed message standards between computer systems. This information exchange is in the context of pure EDI that effectively proceeds without human intervention. While fashion professionals struggle with tight deadlines, top efficiency, and hiked margins, EDI allows companies to improve communication with B2B partners, to ultimately transfer the required data seamlessly and streamline the entire process within the given timeline.
Moreover, fashion companies are able to quickly get desired products to the market with reduced margins and improved efficiency. Manual data entry is time consuming and can naturally be associated with human errors. EDI automation, on the contrary, helps them save a lot of time as well as money – without manual errors. Since EDI enables fashion professionals to transfer their business documents quicker than ever, they can achieve their goals faster and more efficiently. It effectively cuts time from the order fulfilment cycle to accelerate information transfer and order processing.
Today’s fashion merchants are embracing the advantages of apparel EDI to improve inventory optimization and SCM integration. If you still haven’t recognized the necessity of incorporating EDI in your business processes, this is the right time to know that in such a globalized world, it’s critical to establish an electronic relationship with retailers and partners so as to expand your sales channels. In fact, you can hardly sell in the big leagues without EDI.
Advantages of Apparel EDI
- Improved order accuracy
- Better operational efficiency
- Faster communication of critical information
- Shorter order processing time
- Lower transaction costs
- Stronger customer relationships & improved customer service
- Greater visibility to the global supply chain
Apparel EDI has become a vital part of the fashion industry, and a major player in determining the success or failure of a business.
Being a constantly evolving and ever changing industry, it’s absolutely imperative to adapt to the current market trends and the changes in the consumers’ buying behavior and patterns.
A recent trend seen in the fashion industry, and in plenty of other industries, is E-Commerce. E-Commerce is the sale of your products through online mediums (a website, for example). Companies that do not incorporate E-Commerce into their business are limiting themselves and their potential.
Instead of relying on clients having to go to your retail store and make their purchase there, they can simply look at your different products online and go through the entire purchasing process from the comfort of their home or office.
Apparel E-Commerce and fashion EDI go hand-in-hand. Implementing an E-Commerce business model in the fashion industry implies handling huge amounts of data and information, and having constant transactions between a lot of different (both internal and external) parties. Since wholesale EDI software helps companies manage and streamline their information, it becomes practically a necessity to incorporate some sort of apparel EDI to your business if you are adventuring into the E-Commerce world, or even if you’re already using E-Commerce in your business.
For this purpose, fashion companies incorporate apparel EDI into their day-to-day operations.
How does apparel EDI software help fashion companies?
EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange, and it’s a simple electronic format made to replace paper-based documents. EDI allows for information transactions to happen seamlessly between different applications.
EDI helps companies with a lot of different elements of their information transactions, such as:
- Sharing documents: Sharing documents is one of the most common administrative tasks apparel companies have to do, so it’s important to be able to do it in a way that is fast, easy, and reliable. EDI is a type of technology specifically built for this purpose.
- Improving inventory visibility: linked to the previous point, EDI allows for all interested parties, both internal and external, to see the numbers in the different departments. For example, buyers can see an updated count of how many jackets are left in the warehouse.
- Tracing documents: Making sure every involved agent can, at any point, know where the document is located and whether or not it has successfully reached its destination.
- Accuracy: Since the possibility of human error is greatly reduced, EDI makes for much more accurate processes and transactions. Since every human error needs to be fixed, and therefore implies a cost, it becomes clear how much the perfect accuracy that EDI provides helps improve efficiency and productivity.
- Cost effectiveness: as mentioned before, EDI automation heavily reduces the human involvement in information processing and management. This allows the previously involved manpower to be transferred to other sectors or tasks, therefore providing even more value.
It becomes clear that apparel EDI is the future of the industry, and a necessity for companies interested in staying competitive.
Are you seeking expert assistance for your fashion brand’s EDI requirements? Get in touch with InStyle today! Visit https://www.instylesoft.com
