Monthly Tangentia Byte
February 2021
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Tag: edi
Everything Dealers Need to Know about FASTag
Everything Dealers Need to Know about FASTag
Technology is evolving quickly in India and you need to know how to keep up. One of the upcoming changes is how drivers make toll payments when they are on the road. Up until the end of December 2020, drivers will still be able to pay the traditional way – using cash or credit. However, once January 1, 2021 arrives, they will be required to have FASTag.
What Is FASTag?
FASTag is an electronic toll collection system that is operated by the NHAI. It is a technology that is based on Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), which allows drivers to make toll payments without the need for cash or even credit or debit. They don’t even need to stop their car to pay their toll. The FASTag is adhered to the windscreen of their car and scanned whenever the car passes through a toll plaza. The toll is automatically deducted from the driver’s prepaid FASTag account.
Why FASTag?
The use of FASTag has significant benefits for drivers, as well as the highways systems of India. Drivers can move through toll plazas without the inconvenience of stopping or waiting in a lineup of vehicles. This can significantly cut down on their driving time. The FASTag system will keep traffic moving smoothly, preventing congestion at toll plazas. Best of all, the Indian government is offering 2.5 per cent cashback on toll payments made using FASTag.
How to buy a Fastag?
Drivers can get a FASTag from anyone of 23 certified banks, at National Highway toll plazas and through online retail platforms such as Amazon, Snapdeal, and Paytm. Once they have their FASTag, they can link it directly to their credit card, bank account, or wallet. Drivers can top up their prepaid account at any time and every time they go through a toll plaza, they will receive an SMS text message alerting them to the toll payment.
How TiA Industry Accelerator (IA) can help your customers with FASTag?
How does FASTag affect buying a new vehicle? Before that vehicle can be put on the road, a FASTag must be acquired and the account set up. This is yet another item in the long list of things a new car owner must deal with before they can drive off the lot.
The TiA Industry Accelerator is part of the Tangentia Intelligent Automation (TiA) Platform. The TiA IA is built to serve the needs of various industries, offering deployment-ready software solutions built to accelerate business processes. It is built with the automotive retail sector in mind and provides you with digital worker capabilities that allow you to:
- Streamline the collection of vehicle owner data from multiple outlets
- Automate all aspects of purchasing a vehicle from one convenient platform
- Enhance your customer service and increase satisfaction
- Automate mundane tasks for automotive dealerships so you can focus on core competencies
- Ensure regulatory and legal compliance in the automotive industry
The capabilities of TiA Industry Accelerator (IA) can be extended, modified or customized, depending on your needs, making it the ideal solution for all your process automation, including the purchase and setup of FASTag.
At Tangentia, we are ready to partner with you to offer smooth and speedy FASTag compliance for the vehicles sold under your dealership as mandated by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), India. This is a must since, as of April 1, 2021, new third-party vehicle insurance will be issued only if the vehicle has a valid FASTag.
So, let TiA IA help you help your customers purchase the vehicle they want without all the hassle that comes with a vehicle purchase. When you can do this, you will provide your customers with a superior buying experience, enabling them to hit the road immediately.
Get Started Today
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada, USA, Mexico and India to implement their RPA strategies.
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How Cloud EDI Can Transform Business Invoice Reconciliation
How Cloud EDI Can Transform Business Invoice Reconciliation
It’s no secret that automation is a hot topic right now in virtually every industry. The ability to use software to save employee hours and costs and defer that burden to a machine that can process tasks in a fraction of a second is essential for any business with low-profit margins, like the restaurant industry.
After all, every task is critical, and every second counts when your employees are on the clock. And when it comes to finance processes like invoice reconciliation, EDI and automation are rapidly changing the way companies approach these tasks.
This article will explore EDI and invoice reconciliation, and how adding EDI can benefit your business over the long run.
How Automated Invoice Reconciliation Can Benefit Your Company
Any process that a human can do, a machine can do faster and more efficiently, even tasks vital to a business’s profitability, like invoice reconciliation. It is essential to reconcile your invoices as accurately as possible. Doing so will reap the following benefits for your company:
- Saving work hours. Pre-automation, businesses will assign multiple employees to sift through invoices for hours at a time. With automation, these same employees can be contributing to other tasks, while EDI software reconciles the invoices for them.
- Reduce invoice errors. People make errors all the time, even best our best intentions. Invoice errors can profoundly negatively impact a business, from overpaying/underpaying a supplier to not billing a client correctly. The software will not make these same mistakes as all values are based on computer calculations and checks and balances are in place.
- Reconcile many invoices simultaneously. Humans can only process one invoice at a time. The software can process invoices in a fraction of a second. By reconciling many invoices quickly, you will save valuable employee hours.
- Prioritize other more critical business processes. By automating invoice reconciliation, you can re-assign your human employees to other tasks. Every task needs to be prioritized for maximum efficiency to ensure maximum profits.
- Establishes precedence for more automation. Automation saves money, especially when a whole business process can be automated, as in the case of EDI.
- Cloud-stored data. Even the best office practices of data storage are no match for cloud-based storage. Cloud data can be accessed at any time, in any location, as long as you have online or offline access to your data. The same cannot be stated for data locked in an office. By utilizing cloud storage, EDI allows you to save copies of reconciled invoices, and check the reconciliation process for errors when you need to.
The Value of EDI and Invoice Reconciliation
Companies are using automated invoice reconciliation to scale up their business processes, especially in centralized billing. If you own or operate several establishments, you will need to process invoices from multiple locations quickly and efficiently. EDI allows you to do this, even if your various locations are being run independently by different managers.
By using EDI and automating the manual collection of data, you can reduce processing errors and increase efficiency when reconciling invoices. Messy handwriting, wrong inputs, and scanning issues are no longer a problem. You can enter all the pertinent information into a terminal, generate an invoice electronically, and send a copy to a centralized office for automated reconciliation.
Automated EDI is one form of IT management that is transforming business infrastructure and processes. Automation reduces complexity and increases efficiencies that can affect whole work teams, replacing manual, error-prone processes, and saving many more useful employee hours spent on other tasks.
Seamless EDI and Business Automation Starts With Tangentia
How is your company leveraging powerful cloud EDI functionality and automation to transform your invoice reconciliation processes?
Tangentia provides digital solutions for businesses of all sizes. If you’re looking to kickstart your automation journey, we can help. Get in touch with one of our EDI specialists today to get started.
Get Started Today
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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A Quick Guide to Warehouse Inventory Management in 2020
A Quick Guide to Warehouse Inventory Management in 2020
The holidays are fast approaching, and that means retailers and wholesalers must be efficient in organizing their products and managing the inventory of their products.
Depending on the size of your operation, how you manage your products may differ. However, warehouse inventory management is not just a requirement for compliance with SEC regulations and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) for public companies—it’s crucial to the success of any retail company.
We’ve put together this brief guide to help you understand the basics of warehouse inventory management.
What Is Warehouse Inventory Management?
Warehouse inventory management is the system used to organize and track all of the company's owned products. For warehouse operations, this helps to ensure the right level of inventory is in the right place at the right time. Inventory is then converted to revenue once it’s sold.
In the United States, manufacturers, retailers, and merchant wholesalers carried more than $1.9 trillion in inventory in June 2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Accurately evaluating the inventory for the company’s balance sheet requires either physical stock count or an automated inventory system that creates an accurate record of each inventory-related transaction.
This quantitative product management differs slightly from a company’s warehouse management system (WMS), an umbrella term that supports the entire operation of a warehouse, including inventory management.
The best warehouse inventory management systems keep track of products and provide actionable business intelligence, such as identifying trends in product performance and sending reorder notifications when stock is low.
Current warehouse inventory management systems are outdated and often haven’t embraced everything automation has to offer.
Features of Inventory Management
There are many steps involved in warehouse inventory management, some of which include:
- Picking and packing
- Shipping
- Managing locations
- Receiving orders
- Tracking inventory levels
- Cycle counting
- Generating reports
- Providing business insights
What Are the Different Types of Inventory Management?
Manual
Every step of the delivery, tracking, loading, and data manipulation is done by workers. This manual system can increase the risk of human error at any point in the inventory management process. If there is ever a mistake, the only method of resolving the problem is another manual re-do.
Another downside to this type of inventory management is its unsustainability for more significant warehouse operations. Without computerized report generation, companies may see difficulties in turning paper-based information into useful data.
Barcode
This system uses the familiar label of black stripes that are affixed to the product, packaging, or pallet. Using wearable barcode readers, workers can speed up warehouse inventory management and save seconds scanning per item. This digital format is efficient and accurate by counting goods in real-time.
RFID
Radiofrequency identification tags are found in two configurations: active and passive. Active systems use battery-operated tag readers located throughout a warehouse and updates of inventory count and location. Passive systems are read-only when someone activates the readers through hand-held devices. Passive technology can be read at up to 40 feet, while active readers are effective up to 300 feet, but both systems automatically record inventory.
Warehouse Robots
With growing advancements in technology and automation, companies are starting to turn to optical systems mounted on the ground or aerial platforms. These systems use machine learning to read existing labels without barcodes or RFID and maintain accurate, up-to-date inventory.
Warehouse Inventory Automation: Is This the New Norm?
Modern supply chains are more complex than ever. Traditional manual processes are no longer viable for businesses that want to optimize workflows and reduce wasted resources.
Automation is the natural solution to these problems. It’s ideal for individual warehouses or companies that support numerous locations across the entire supply chain.
Effective fulfillment requires sophisticated solutions that are able to predict trends, make actionable recommendations, and increase the visibility of potential issues before they turn into larger problems.
Successful manufacturers, 3PLs, and retailers know the importance of optimized supply chains. That’s why they’ve heavily invested in cloud-based automation solutions for their supply chains.
Automate Your Warehouse Inventory Management With Tangentia
Here at Tangentia, we understand the transformative difference automated solutions can make for your business.
When you’re processing hundreds or thousands of pallets or cartons per day, automated processes can significantly save time, effort, and costs. For many retail companies, creating greater warehouse inventory management efficiency translates to a multi-million dollar impact.
Are you interested in learning more about warehouse inventory management automation? Get in touch with Tangentia today to learn more.
Get Started Today
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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Monthly Tangentia Byte October 2020
Monthly Tangentia Byte
October 2020
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Monthly Tangentia Byte September 2020
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Monthly Tangentia Byte
September 2020
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Monthly Tangentia Byte August 2020
Monthly Tangentia Byte
August 2020
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How Just-In-Time Inventory, EDI, and RPA Keep Your Business at Its Most Efficient
Automating Your Inventory : How Just-In-Time Inventory, EDI, and RPA Keep Your Business at Its Most Efficient
When it comes to your company’s supply chain, one of the most common weak links is inventory management. There are very few businesses that handle their inventory management well. Typically, retail businesses face problems scaling up their inventory management systems as they grow.
As your business grows, efficient inventory practices become more and more worth investing in. Retail companies with poor inventory management can suffer from stock issues, slowed turnover times, and needing to order excess inventory to prevent running out of stock. Slow delivery and stock issues are a sure way to reduce customer satisfaction, so keeping these issues at a minimum is important.
How can retail companies improve their stock management and inventory processes? For most businesses, the answer is automation. Most inventory management issues stem from human error, inefficient practices, and incomplete item information. Automation resolves all these issues. It is intrinsically efficient and requires complete item information, and eliminates human error.
So, how can your business get started with inventory automation? The process isn’t as difficult as you might think. Just-in-Time Inventory (JIT), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are a few strategies that you can utilize onto your supply chain to be well on the way to an optimized system.
What Is Just-in-Time (JIT) Inventory?
JIT inventory is a way to decrease waste and increase the efficiency of your supply chain. With JIT, your supply chain only receives goods as they become needed.
Pros of JIT?
JIT keeps your business at maximum efficiency. By having goods on hand only when they’re needed, you can keep your supply chain operating smoothly without needing to worry about long-term storage of stock.
Maintaining JIT inventory reduces the amount of waste your supply chain produces from leftover, unused goods. It also keeps the investment into your supply low, as you don’t need to stock more goods than you need.
Cons of JIT
While JIT keeps your business on top of its efficiency when supply is readily available, it can cause your business to suffer greatly from issues farther down the line of the supply chain.
Since you don’t keep a stockpile of the goods your supply chain uses, if they suddenly become scarce or expensive, your business might unexpectedly run out of stock. You might also end up needing to buy overpriced stock.
What Is Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)?
In general, Electronic Data Interchange is simply the technical term for two computers communicating with each other. In the context of the supply chain, EDI is a way to get a full digital picture of your electronic transaction exchanges with your customers, as well as your inventory.
Pros of EDI
Many supply chain issues, such as inventory shortages and surpluses, happen because of a lack of inventory visibility. EDI allows you to keep track of all your inventory in one centralized location, making it easy to track and prevent inventory errors.
With EDI, it’s also much easier to manage more complex inventory processes, such as multichannel sales. The more complicated the process, the more likely it is for human error to occur.
Having a guarantee that all of the information about your inventory is accurate allows you to make supply decisions with the big picture in mind. Overall, EDI improves almost all aspects of the inventory management process.
Cons of EDI
EDI can be hard to adjust for your supply chain to work around, especially if it is a legacy EDI system that is in place. This is especially the case for rapidly growing businesses, which don’t usually have particularly well-optimized supply chains.
If your inventory isn’t well-suited to EDI, it can take some work to get full value out of the EDI system. You may need to overhaul some of your inventory processes altogether.
What Is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?
RPA is a way to increase the efficiency of your inventory management by replacing human operators with various digital systems. With an RPA system, the computer essentially uses itself by means of a virtual operator, called an RPA robot.
RPA robots have a wide array of functionalities and are able to completely replace human users for many applications. They can perform tasks such as moving and collecting data from various sources, as well as process data by performing calculations.
Pros of RPA
RPA can allow for quite a lot of inventory management automation, sometimes up to 90%. In general, processes that can be automated should be, as humans are almost always slower than an RPA robot. RPA robots can drastically increase the efficiency of your inventory management processes.
Like EDI, RPA removes the human element from many processes. In particular, RPA robots can handle data entry, data processing, and other repetitive tasks easily, with a 0% rate of error. This gives them a sizable advantage over humans, who are unable to focus on these tasks for as long.
RPA systems can also keep running overnight, giving them yet another advantage over human operators. Overall, RPA is almost guaranteed to provide a large boost to your business’s supply chain efficiency.
Cons of RPA
Like EDI, a proper RPA system is not trivial to implement. Rolling out an RPA project into your business’s inventory management or production environments actually has a good chance of failing at first. After some troubleshooting, you will likely start getting full value out of the RPA system.
Tying It All Together
Automation is a great way to increase efficiency and eliminate errors within your inventory management process. It can’t do the job on its own, though: if you want to optimize your inventory management, you should use a combination of JIT, EDI, and RPA.
How JIT, EDI, and RPA Complement Each Other
On their own, these three methods of optimizing your inventory are sure to increase your efficiency significantly. When put together, though, they are more than the sum of their parts.
The biggest weakness of JIT is that it’s prone to human error. Improper data entry can result in an unexpected stock outage of your product. EDI and RPA prevent this by removing the capacity for human error in the majority of the inventory management operation.
On the other hand, EDI and RPA can suffer from bottlenecks. It doesn’t matter how efficient your data processing is if your business is bogged down by extra costs relating to storage or other inefficiencies. JIT helps alleviate this bottleneck by increasing the efficiency of your business outside of data processing.
Can I Have JIT or EDI Without RPA?
While JIT, EDI, and RPA are tools that are best used together, they can be used individually to great effect. You should make sure you’re on the lookout for the potential issues with using these tools.
So as long as you build your inventory management process around the tools you’re using—you should be able to work around JIT, EDI, and RPA’s various weaknesses. Overall though, we recommend trying to implement all three inventory management tools, as they work best in tandem.
An Investment in JIT Is an Investment in Efficiency
If your business has been growing and you’re having trouble handling demand for your products, the solution may not be to expand and spend more. Oftentimes, it’s much more budget-friendly and effective to invest in ways to improve your efficiency than expand your flawed, existing system.
When it comes to improving the efficiency of your supply chain, the best way is with automation. JIT, EDI, and RPA are all easy-to-implement forms of automation that are designed to provide you with a quick return on investment. Once you have these systems in place, you’ll find that your inventory management model is much more scalable.
If you’re interested in learning more about JIT, EDI, or RPA, feel free to contact us today to find out how these tools can help your business be the best it can be.
Get Started Today
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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Integrating Your EDI Data Into Your ERP Systems: What Are Your Options?
Integrating Your EDI Data Into Your ERP Systems: What Are Your Options?
By Karen Briones
Everyone’s heard about Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems by now. But seamlessly integrating EDI data into an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is one area where many companies struggle. It’s important that these two systems communicate flawlessly to minimize processing times, eliminate errors, and avoid compliance issues.
Many companies rely on EDI systems that they struggle to maintain as they start to transition into the era of cloud technology. Most of them are legacy EDI systems that have been patched along over the decades, and trying to make them compatible with modern ERP systems is often a challenge.
So, how can you ensure that your EDI data is compatible with your ERP system? Let’s start by assessing the types of problems that most companies face when trying to integrate their EDI data with their ERP.
The Most Common EDI Data Integration Problems
Let’s face it—incorporating your EDI data into your ERP system isn’t an easy task. Here are a few of the most common problems you’ll encounter:
- Poorly-built integrations that aren’t standardized. The entire premise of EDI is built around the idea of standardized file formats. Your organization may have developed a series of internal processes and policies over the years. Each layer of added difficulty only complicates the integration process.
- Handing the project off to an inexperienced team. Every aspect of your integration needs to be managed carefully as a simple error could potentially lead to a halt of the rest of the downstream processes, and worst, compliance issues. Don’t make the mistake of handing the project off to an inexperienced team. The data you send and receive is important to your business, and it’s vital that your vendors and suppliers have access to accurate and compliant data to minimize disruptions to your business processes.
- Relying too heavily on manual processes. Accountability and control are important aspects of EDI—but relying on manual processes can complicate the integration process. It is best practice to automate these processes to ensure that the data that you are integrating is accurate and reliable from end-to-end.
- Deploying too many back-end applications. It’s not uncommon for businesses to use various CRM’s, ERP’s, and other applications to simplify their back-end processes. However, integrating your EDI data into multiple applications can increase the likelihood of costly errors being made.
Every organization is unique, and the challenges you face may be different. Still, your main focus should always be on maintaining the integrity and accessibility of the data that is essential to your business and your customers.
EDI Data and ERP Integration: Your Options
Several options exist when it comes to integrating your EDI data into an ERP system. The most popular options include:
Use a Third-Party EDI Integration Plugin
Some companies use a Third-Party EDI Integration Plugin that acts as a bridge between their EDI and ERP systems. While this may prove successful for your organization, the cost associated with this option is typically high.
Work with a Third Party EDI Service Provider
Third party EDI service providers not only ensure your EDI compliance with your trading partners’ EDI requirements, but they also typically offer ready-to-use integration modules for most ERPs. Many companies rely on Third Party EDI Service Providers to fully manage their overall EDI infrastructure, freeing them from costly in-house management and maintenance of these systems.
Utilize Web Services
The more modern ERP, WMS and eCommerce platforms have started to embrace web services/API integration to allow their applications to seamlessly communicate with other applications. EDI data can be incorporated into your ERP by utilizing APIs.
Implement Flat Files
Flat files are known as text database files. They are the most basic form of EDI data available. This method uses simple text files called flat-files (or CSV) to ensure data is compatible with the majority of ERP systems. Other EDI systems may use the XML format. These two file formats are the global standard in EDI and are highly-integratable with other ERP solutions.
Need Help Choosing the Right Integration Option for Your Company?
Integrating your EDI data into an ERP system is a major process that every organization that handles huge amounts of data should consider. Tangentia specializes in fully integrated EDI solutions, and can help your company successfully build the bridge between your EDI, ERP, WMS, eCommerce and other business applications.
Tangentia has decades of experience working with EDI systems, and we understand exactly what it takes to build an automated system that is flexible, compliant, and functional while being cost-effective.
Get in touch with a member of the Tangentia team today to see how we can automate your EDI data flow between your existing business applications.
Get Started Today
Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
Read Now
Monthly Tangentia Byte – March
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Monthly Tangentia Byte
March 2020
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