Supply Chain Unlocked
Supply Chain Unlocked delivers actionable intelligence for suppliers to Walmart and other retailers. Hosted by Dr. Matthew Waller—renowned supply chain expert, author, and trusted advisor—the show decodes the strategies, technology, and leadership required to win on the world’s biggest retail stage. Each episode blends Dr. Waller’s expertise with insights from industry leaders, innovators, and former retail executives, giving listeners clear and practical strategies to navigate compliance, harness technology, and build stronger partnerships. More than just commentary, the show provides the intelligence and actionable guidance suppliers need to stay ahead in today’s fast-changing supply chain.
Supply Chain Unlocked
Ep. 5 - The Hidden Cost of EDI Chaos
Orders don’t move without clean data. We go deep with Jonathan Kish, SVP at Orderful, to reveal why EDI still runs global retail, where it quietly breaks omnichannel performance, and how modern teams can turn a tangle of maps and testing into a fast, reliable growth engine. From empty shelves to OTIF deductions, the symptoms are familiar; the root causes live in outdated mapping, slow retailer testing cycles, and inventory that never syncs across stores, marketplaces, and drop ship networks.
Jonathan explains how retailers standardize on EDI specs and why that foundation won’t vanish just because APIs are popular. He breaks down the documents that matter: 850s for POs, 856s for ASNs, 204/210 for freight, 810 for invoices, and 997 acknowledgments, and shows where small errors become big penalties. We explore the onboarding bottleneck that delays first purchase orders by months, plus the ripple effects on cash flow, vendor scorecards, and customer promise dates. Real case studies highlight how a single JSON-style integration and automated validations can migrate hundreds to thousands of partners in weeks, not quarters, without rewriting code per retailer.
We also look ahead. As agentic shopping grows and real-time inventory promises are made in chat, search, and social, the margin for data errors shrinks. Jonathan shares how AI-driven validation and captured testing “tribal knowledge” can compress EDI cycles from months to days, and eventually hours, while web-based EDI opens a simple path for smaller suppliers to trade without engineers or per-transaction fees. If you care about omnichannel reliability, faster vendor onboarding, and fewer chargebacks, this conversation is a practical blueprint for turning EDI from a drag into an advantage.
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I want to clarify that this podcast is distinct from my responsibilities as a professor in the CMM Walton College of Business. Nonetheless, it aligns with my aspiration to provide practical insights to professionals and business by showcasing companies and people that can enhance your ability to manage, lead, and strategize and market effectively and the retail value chain. And now without further ado, let's get into the exciting episode. I have with me today Jonathan Kish. He is senior vice president at Orderful. And he has a tremendous uh experience background in logistics and technology. But Orderful is solving a really important problem for many industries. But I was particularly interested because of its relevance to omnichannel retailing. And it's relevant not just to retailers, but also to suppliers of retailers and carriers and other logistics types of service providers. So, Jonathan, thank you so much for taking time to be with me today. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. We've known each other for a couple of years, Matt. Great uh great to be a guest on the podcast. So, Jonathan, you know, um it's really interesting.
SPEAKER_02:Most people in the retail value chain, and I'm saying that very broadly, are dependent on EDI, and yet most of them, especially at very senior levels, don't really know what it is. And now that they're trying to adapt to the omnichannel world, whether they be a retailer or a supplier or a carrier or other service provider, many times the senior people aren't aware of how much it's impeding their success in omni-channel excellence. And um, I know you know in Northwest Arkansas, it's a really big deal, uh, but I am always surprised how many uh teams I talk to that aren't aware of the importance of EDI or even that it's occurring within their company. So they don't know that that's what's slowing them down. And one thing that's really interesting about it, Jonathan you know, uh Northwest Arkansas, of course, we have over 1,500 suppliers here, a lot of carriers, service providers. And of course, Walmart. Walmart has stated, you know, their purpose statement says Walmart is a people-led, tech-powered, omni-channel retailer dedicated to helping people save money and live better. And it's really interesting. So suppliers then have to really join into that purpose statement. And they don't realize in a lot of cases that their EDI, because they're not aware of it, is hurting their ability to move forward, both from a cost perspective and from a on-time delivery perspective, and from many other uh perspectives. So if you wouldn't mind just giving a quick brief overview of what EDI is before we get into what orderful does.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and it's it's funny. I've I spent about 15 years on the logistics e-commerce side before I joined Orderful. So the only thing I really knew deeply about EDI was that it was difficult. Um having said that, it's it's been around since the 1960s. It was actually developed by the US military as a way to send and receive data. But from uh from a holistic background, if you think about the fact that every major retailer in North America, Europe, Asia is sending and receiving data in three different ways. Uh, the first is still, believe it or not, asynchronous purchase orders and carrier information. It could be over email fax, et cetera. The second is something that is obviously more modern, which is APIs. But the third, and that's where we specialize, is EDI information that's sent between Walmart, Target, et cetera, and their suppliers. Uh and I was surprised to learn when I joined Ortiful that it's uh it's a$15 billion industry in North America alone, and it's a$50 billion industry globally. And that's just on the software and people that are used to power the transactions that go between said retailer and said supplier. But when you think about, and and you know Walmart, you know, as good as anyone who doesn't work there, there's probably, you know, hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of software and people that have built up their supplier-buyer network over decades. But really, what's in a purchase order, what's in a shipment, right? You're talking about potentially trillions of dollars annually that are sent and received between these retailers and their suppliers uh over EDI. So it's it's it's uh it's a massive way that folks trade. Um, I would say it's something suppliers like to run away from instead of run towards.
SPEAKER_02:It's funny, I if you would have asked me back in the 90s, because when I had my software company back in the 90s, I struggled with EDI as well. And um, you know, this was the time that the World Wide Web just came out, and um, you know, things were moving so fast. And if you would have asked me back then, do you think EDI is still gonna be a big problem, you know, in 30 years, I would have said people won't know what EDI is in 30 years. So, you know, in a world of APIs and real-time platforms, why does EDI still matter so much?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I I get that question from the market, from customers, etc. If you first think about like what is an EDI requirement or an EDI spec, it's specifically designed for one retailer and their supplier community in a various flow. So take Target, for example. They might have one EDI spec for procure to pay. But when it comes to freight to pay on their transportation side, that's going to be an entirely new requirement that's set up by them for their carriers to follow. So think about that at one retailer multiplied times every single retailer. And what I mean by that is when people think why is EDI going to be around or why is it not going away, it's because it would take every major company that sends and receives EDI data to decide they're no longer going to do that over the same time horizon. And that's when I go back to what I said earlier. There are hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of software and people that have gone into building these transactions, but there's trillions of dollars that is inside these EDI transactions, and it represents a huge risk to make any changes to the supply chains on the retail side.
SPEAKER_02:Boy, the military had no idea what they were starting, did they? Uh so so Jonathan, um, you know, what are some of the hidden ways poorly constructed and managed or executed EDI shows up in the omnichannel environment?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so let's first let's look at it from two lenses. First, on the on the retail side. So how it shows up is you might have a network of hundreds, thousands. If you're one of the largest retailers, tens of thousands of suppliers. And your onboarding team can no longer scale as you add new trade, what we call trading partners every single year. So the first way it shows up for them is I have a team of 12 people to manage 2,000 suppliers. But as I add my 100th, 200th, 300th supplier to that, I need to continue to scale human beings to answer the testing questions from my suppliers. The second is, and this one applies both to the supplier and the retailer, bad data showing up. So everybody knows what chargebacks are in Walmart. They're known as OTIFs on the shipping side. These are errors that can occur because supplier A is sending invalid data on what the retailer is asking them to send. And so, because of that, the retailer has to either mark up, you know, their purchase order to account for these predicted uh chargebacks. Or obviously for the supplier whose margins are razor thin, these are surprises that that they get at the end of a quarter from their trading partner because they didn't adhere to what they were asking them to receive. And then the third, you know, piece that shows up is on the supplier side specifically, especially for those brands that are even, you know, billion-dollar brands who started on the e-commerce side but are starting to add those retail wholesale trading partners for the first time. It's taking forever to stand up those integrations. So take Liquid Death, who's one of our customers. They obviously are a newer, you know, a newer brand when it comes to food and bev. For them to stand up a new grocer without order flow, it was taking anywhere from eight to 20 weeks to go live. And where that shows up is your sales team, your account management team has negotiated a new agreement with a retailer, but you have to wait two, three quarters to receive that first purchase order. So it's cutting off the lifeblood of your business because it's taking so long technically to get through testing with the retailer. Wow, that that's remarkable.
SPEAKER_02:You know, you and you think about it um from a retailer's perspective too. Um, you know, EDR often slows down their onboarding of vendors, new vendors, their ability to draw uh communicate from a drop ship perspective or to send inventory updates. Um so would you mind discussing that just a little bit and the prevalence of that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so if you if you think about, you know, a a retailer, take uh take a Kohl's, for example. So they have their 1P division where they're doing their procure-to-pay uh for their stores, but they also have a drop shipping division on their website. And obviously the folks who are drop shipping for them have their own 3 PLs that are usually being uh used to fulfill the goods on behalf of said supplier for coals. And so anywhere during that data that's set and received, where potentially the supplier doesn't know that this has to be said and sent in pounds instead of ounces, that's an error that could come up, A, in the chargeback like we said earlier, or B, when it comes to inventory levels. If your 3PL as a supplier in the drop shipping division doesn't know exactly how many SKUs, how many, what your inventory levels are, you might accept a purchase order from a large retailer. But then when somebody goes to buy a good on your website, you might not have the right inventory levels. So you're gonna have a poor customer experience, either with your retail partner or with your online buyer, because those that information is not syncing in real time. And that's what having poor data, whether it be API, again, those asynchronous orders or EDI really comes into play and hurts folks.
SPEAKER_02:I remember um, and I may get the number rolling here, but when I first moved to Northwest Arkansas, there was a lot of um suppliers, especially big suppliers, engaged in uh something called vendor-managed inventory, which was where uh the supplier would monitor the warehouse inventory levels. And um then based on the current inventory levels at their customer, they would um they would ship, make shipments, you know, orders. And um and I think it was the 856 warehouse withdrawal that they would look at, you know, to figure out how much inventory is left, because they knew how much they shipped in. So I could see in that situation um how an 856 would be really important warehouse withdrawals, but there's other uh EDI uh transaction types that are important in Omni Channel. What are some others?
SPEAKER_00:Well, the the lifeblood of a lot of businesses is the 850, right? And so that purchase order that's sent by the retailer to the to the supplier is um that's that's the best document, I'm sure, for most of our customers. Um that's an important one. The 810 on the on the freight side, the 204, the 210, right? How carriers send and receive loads and tenders to said shipper retailer are also kind of lifeblood documents on that side as well. Um and then another big one that's that's kind of not always thought about is the functional acknowledgement, right? So uh I receive a purchase order, I have to tell the retailer that this purchase order has been received by my company, and that's uh the 997.
SPEAKER_02:And um, you know, thinking about this from a SaaS platform perspective, yeah, where you're trying to deal with lots of retailers, lots of logistics connections, suppliers, et cetera, et cetera. Um, what's the experience like for a SaaS platform trying to support all that?
SPEAKER_00:That's a great question. Um I mean, it's something I've been working on with our with our partners and customers over you know the four years that I've been here. But if you think of if you think of a SaaS platform, they're built on solving a specific problem for a specific vertical. Uh take a merge, right? One of our portfolio, one of your portfolio companies, also one of our customers, they're an amazing uh freight-to-pay as well as supply chain platform for shippers and carriers in that space. They're not EDI experts. And so they're building everything with their product around APIs, which is how everybody builds everything. And then when they see an X12 spec for the first time from a shipper, or if they see an Etifax spec in Europe from a shipper, your developers at these platforms don't know what to do because you've got folks who have gotten computer science degrees from Stanford, Cal, et cetera. Um, you're not learning these languages anymore. And so it becomes a technical gap for these platforms to fill. I don't have folks who can understand the actual language of X12 and Etifact, or I don't have folks that, you know, we can get up to speed fast enough on this. And then the other piece is these platforms don't even want to become experts in this. It's already hard to become an OMS, right? It's already be hard to become a TMS and separate yourself from the hundreds and thousands of TMSs that are out there. This is something that orderful and not just us, right? There's a lot of public, large, publicly traded companies that have tried to solve EDI for dozens of years. We've put hundreds of millions of dollars of you know infrastructure and people into solving this problem. Um, it's not something that like a newer nascent vertical software provider wants to go out and necessarily solve on their own.
SPEAKER_02:Jonathan, how does a retailer or a platform get stuck with legacy EDI? And what does it take to unwind that?
SPEAKER_00:So how you get stuck is because you don't think there's another way. Right? If if you think of the the three ways that a platform or a retailer will will kind of build EDI integrations. The first is kind of legacy on-prem mapping software. You know, and there's large acronyms that that do that historically. The second is there's middleware companies that have kind of EDI mappers built into them. And then the third is there's professional service companies that use one of those two methods to to send and receive those EDI transactions on behalf of someone. But what happens is you start doing this. And no matter which of those three paths you true you choose, the true kind of statement is there's a map that has to be built between every single retailer and transaction type that a supplier has to send and receive. That map could take someone anywhere from six to twenty hours to build, but it has to be built on a per trading partner per transaction type. And then the second is it takes anywhere from, like I said earlier, four to twelve weeks to get through EDI testing with these legacy providers. And so, you know, you say, how do people get stuck? If you have one or two trading partners, that's not a problem. Right. But if you have a hundred, two hundred, three hundred trading partners and you're a supplier, and each of those trading partners have four document types, well, all of a sudden you have 1,200 maps that you have in your ERP, your OMS, your TMS. It looks like spaghetti code. Um, I think we're going to talk about how people can kind of get out of that later, but that's how they get themselves into that situation. Um and I I I to kind of put an end to that, I think it's because of what I said earlier. No matter what solution they've chosen historically, there's that map that's being built, every single trading partner and transaction type. Very interesting.
SPEAKER_02:There's so many things in business where you see how decisions that were made very early continue to haunt industry and the world later. It's it's pretty amazing.
SPEAKER_00:I I think that statement is true, but I also think like technology is good for a given time, right? There's a five to seven year cycle on you know, vertical technology that comes in and disrupts. So, you know, those on-prem mapping products were amazing in the late 80s, early 90s. And I think the middleware companies, they were very, very ubiquitous, but also they solved a problem in the early 2000s, late 2000s. Um the only real reason we knew how to solve this problem is because our CEO, Eric Kaiser, was actually a systems integrator, uh, taking retailers and brands uh from on-prem ERPs to the cloud uh in the early 2010s. And when he was building these integrations, he realized at the end of them what I said earlier was true. It was an engineering event, every trading partner transaction type, and what he was handing over to his customers wasn't scalable. So it took him having to like get in this problem, looking at those transactions, going live hundreds and thousands of times to know there could be a different way to to solve it.
SPEAKER_02:You know, I'm thinking about um drop shipping, 3PL orchestration. And you know, um a lot of times it it's it's really easy for us to think about how EDI can impede speed. Cycle time. And and that's so important. Uh it's m it's probably more important now from a competitive perspective than it was a few years ago. Um but in addition to eroding uh time, cycle time, it also erodes trust. Because you know, trust is built on competence. Can you do what you say you're gonna do? Um do you have integrity to do what you you have promised to do? And do you have our best interest in mind? I think that you know, with companies stuck with legacy uh EDI, this can make them look incompetent. They may have everything else fine, but it can really make them look incompetent or maybe lack integrity. You wouldn't think something like that could, but it it does.
SPEAKER_00:And it can also cost them relationships with retailers, it can cost them purchase orders, right? Like if you become a problem supplier for a retailer, if your product is good enough, the retailer is still going to sell it. But um, as you know, how many new protein bars do you see on the shelves when you go to the grocery store? All of these brands are trying to stand out and they all have great messages. You know, the room for error is very minimal to get on a shelf in those grocers, right? Like you have to deliver, you have to have a great product, yes, but you also have to be reliable for the retailer. You know, you mentioned the 3PL too. If you're a brand, you don't think about this because you're not fulfilling those orders yourself. But if I use, I'm not going to name any names, but if I use a 3PL, and that 3PL is using outdated EDI technology to send and receive those orders, whether I want to improve things or not, I'm reliant on the software that my partner has chosen to send and receive that 900 series uh set from from my from myself to to said shipper or retailer. So, like you said, there's a lot of layers where errors can occur. Some are in your control, some are out of your control.
SPEAKER_02:You know, um one thing that's becoming really important. I don't know if you've heard, um week before last, there was a big announcement um that Walmart had um formed a partnership with OpenAI. Um, and so you know, you can be searching on ChatGPT and buy directly from Walmart. It's it's a big it was a big announcement. Um, and it really fits in with Walmart's omni channel purpose, you know, because they want to allow shoppers to shop however they want, and clearly people are starting to shop more um through uh through um AI than just through Google search bars and things like that. The world's changing very rapidly. But sometimes things under the hood, and and we also are talking, right, all these retailers are talking about agentic shopping, where you know you don't have to actually do it, especially for items that you replenish frequently for your pantry or your refrigerator. Agents can can do it for you. Um and it's wonderful. You know, it's a great time saver. I think people are going to move more and more to that. But I think people often forget that, well, wait a minute, this is all assuming that your inventory updates across the channels are available. Um what are your thoughts on that? Is that true?
SPEAKER_00:Is that an issue or not? I think that's true, and that's an issue. I mean, I have an opinion on that though. Uh a few years ago, TikTok shops, right, kind of came to the scene. Yeah. And I'm trying to think of how to say this, but anyone who could sell on TikTok shops did what they had to do to sell on TikTok shops because that's where that's where the demand was. And so, you know, I think what you're saying does cause a concern for those folks that are that are worried about those inventory levels. And again, call it like buyer efficacy when you're buying something. Is it there? You know, the thing with with OpenAI, though, and all of the AgenTick engines, they're gonna have the demand. And so I'm I'm sure that there's gonna be some chaos, but folks are going to figure out a way to overcome that just because the demand is there.
SPEAKER_02:Talking about orderful a little bit, what's the core product insight that sets you apart?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think from a from a vision standpoint, we've been talking about uh the four nines, right, that we're looking to solve for customers. So uh we've taken EDI onboarding from 12 months to nine days. Now you want to take it to nine hours, nine minutes, and then nine seconds. The core problem we're going about fixing is yes, we believe EDI, you know, the actual map building is an art is an outdated process. But when it comes to fixing the problem, you have to fix EDI onboarding because that's where the delays occur for customers. Interesting. So, do you have any customer success stories? We have hundreds. Uh just uh let's let's go through a couple though. First on the supplier side. So G3 is one of the largest uh apparel companies um in North America, and they were on a legacy van and legacy mapping tool uh in the first half of last year. They're migrating to a new ERP, a SaaS ERP, for the first time in their company's history. And they had, you know, a little north of 400, 500 suppliers or 400, 500 retailers that they had to take from the prem to the cloud. And so with orderful, they were able to move uh 450 or so of those retailers over to our EDI solution. I think it was 92 days, and they were able to do that because we decouple the map building process of EDI and the EDI testing. So with us, uh a supplier just has to integrate one transaction type, and then they can onboard dozens, hundreds, thousands of retailers on that single transaction. And then you're doing testing when you're ready to do testing. Um, so G3 is uh a great example on the supplier side. Um on the retail side, we've got uh one of the you know top 30, 35 retailers in America that were again on a legacy van provider. They had to migrate 2,000 of their suppliers over to orderful, and they were able to do that in nine months. Um, again, mainly because on that side, they were able to send 2,000 trade requests to their supplier community. And orderful's product was able to validate what Coles was asking their suppliers to send them in real time and get them through the the testing process in you know hours instead of days.
SPEAKER_02:You're lucky you're not with me because I actually have come down with a little bit of a cold, I think. Maybe not. It's either an allergy or cold.
SPEAKER_00:I had it, I had it last week. It's brutal. Yeah, it's brutal.
SPEAKER_02:Well, okay, let's um let's go on. Um, can I should I ask you about the one map per partner? Yeah. So we we wait, so let me let me ask you. So, Jonathan, how do you eliminate the one partner one map per partner problem?
SPEAKER_00:So I mentioned earlier that people are building EDI maps on a per trading partner per transaction type. Great companies can build those maps in six to eight hours. Many companies take 15 to 25 hours to build those maps. That is how everyone else has historically built integrations. With orderful, what we've done is similar to Stripe with payments or Twilio with communications, we have our customers build one integration to a simple JSON schema. It looks like an API. So any developer that looks at our API docs will say, I know exactly what to do there. It's a hundred lines of code or less. And on that single transaction type integration, a supplier can build that into their ERP, develop that into their TMS, develop it that into their OMS, and not have to touch their code when they add another retailer, because we've covered all retail guidelines in our simple uh API schema that we've developed. We did that by going through with our team in AI every retailer guideline over the last five years. So because we've seen what every guideline looks like, and because we've been AI first since the company started, we've been able to know exactly what are the core, you know, fundamental line items that that these retailers are asking their suppliers to send them.
SPEAKER_02:That's exciting. Um, one product I'd like to ask you about is your web EDI product. And could you explain that a little bit, but also talk about how that can help retailers and dealing with less technical suppliers?
SPEAKER_00:These are these are the folks who have the hardest time trading for the first time. So I'm uh I'm a small supplier. Maybe I use a buying group in Bentonville, Arkansas to help me get into Walmart for the first time. Now the hard part comes, I have to get that data to the retailer. And so they might not have the ability to develop an API or or develop EDI at this time. And so they need a web-based solution that they can receive a purchase order, send ASNs to their trading partner. And that's when our Web EDI fulfillment offers uh our brands to do for the first time. Uh the great thing there is um, especially for the the core retailers, we're able on that product to get our brands live in two weeks or less. It's also the only product in EDI that a brand can use without talking to a sales rep. So they can go up, sign up, and trade data with a retailer uh for the first time. Um, we have a very clean pricing model as well. It's$189 a month. We don't charge you for transactions. It's the perfect solution for a brand trading EDI uh for the first time. That's exciting.
SPEAKER_02:Um I mean, you know, there's a lot of innovative products coming online, and so this could really be good for the economy as a whole, getting more trade going.
SPEAKER_00:You know, and it it it it'll be, we've seen it, right? So we launched the product two years ago. Um, it's it's a solution that has been in the space for you know probably 10-15 years, that non-integrated EDI solution. But what our brands are telling us after using this for the first time, if they've used another solution, is we can't believe how cost effective it is, and we can't believe how quickly we can trade with a retailer, right? Like being able to sign up on your own without talking to a sales rep, being able to say, I want to trade with retailer ABC, doing that and getting through testing without having to talk to anyone. Um they they love the speed and they love the simplicity in the model.
SPEAKER_02:You know, anyone who's dealt with EDI directly, especially, knows these problems are just everywhere. It's so frustrating. Um, and people that work in EDI actually doing the work a lot of times want to get out of it as quick as they can. Um but uh so given all that and the performance issues, why don't more companies invest in fixing the problems of EDI?
SPEAKER_00:I think some, I mean, and this is only you know on the on the folks that I've talked to over the years. I think one, people don't people have been burned by some of those legacy providers. And so they may have already switched from an on-prem, you know, EDI software company to a professional service company. And it hasn't changed the experience for them. It still takes forever, it's still a huge cost. So I think the first is they don't know there's a better way. I think unfortunately the second is there's the perception that EDI was a sunk cost. So yes, it was very painful to get these integrations with our trading partners in place. But it's a pain that happened. And and now I'm on to another problem I have to solve in my business. Resources are are limited at every brand and retailer that I speak to. Uh, those are the kind of the two main things that I see.
SPEAKER_02:So if I were a CIO involved in ERP migration, what advice would you give to me about EDI modernization? Should about yeah, regarding timing or just anything you think would be good for me to know?
SPEAKER_00:That what people are telling you that it's something you have to run away from, or it's something you have to decouple with your your broader ERP migration, that's all a lie. You know, I have seen hundreds of customers go live on the same day with NetSuite, with Infor, with SAP, with Microsoft Dynamics, and Orderful as their EDI solution. And, you know, last week I was talking to the CFO at Everyman Jack. His name is Steve Fox. He's a great guy. And he sent me a screenshot on the day they went live with NetSuite and Orderful. Um, on the exact same day, uh, we actually had a day to spare, and he was like, he was like, I can't believe we made this timeline. And even during the buying process with him, you know, they had about 50-something trading partners. They had to buy, build Net Suite, and get those trading partners into Netsuite in a hundred days. I was completely confident during the buying cycle because I know what our product can do, because we're decoupling the risk of the map in the ERP to the trading partner testing. We're the only company that can do both of those parts of EDI at the same time.
SPEAKER_02:There's a quote from Sam Walton that I really love and it applies to so many businesses, and that is there's only one boss, the customer, and he can fire anyone from the chairman on down. And, you know, we see that it sometimes takes time, but customers in the end are the boss. Um and so customer experience at omnichannel is really important. How could you talk a little bit about um explain the importance of EDI in the context of omnichannel scale, uh partner agility, and customer experience?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So let's let's talk about the the end customer first, right? Like how many times, and it's it's happening less and less, but especially you know, coming out of COVID and depending on the storms that are happening, do you go into a grocer's and you see, you know, shelves are empty? Well, shelves are empty for a couple of reasons. The first could be trucks didn't get there because of delay, but the second is uh maybe purchase orders didn't have enough lead time on them. You know, maybe the suppliers didn't have enough time to fulfill what they were actually being asked to send, to, to, to send to them. Um, on the customer side, right? Again, when you think of those digitally native brands that are omnichannel, so they have their own Shopify or Big Commerce store, but they're also selling in a large retailer. I might buy something online today and it says it's gonna be there in three to five days. But if those inventory levels are off because said brand just received an order for a thousand t-shirts from one of the largest retailers, and my 3PL didn't sync that with my Shopify or Big Commerce store, yes, I'm still gonna get what I ordered, but it could take anywhere from two to five weeks instead of five days or less. And that's gonna make me upset. I might not buy from that brand site again. And so going back to having the data be real time, like have looking at where you sell your items and where people buy your items more holistically, it's it's a necessity for brands today. That's great.
SPEAKER_02:So I know you've you're so deep into this and so knowledgeable. Um if if all of the companies were involved in using EDI, shippers, carriers, logistic service providers, on and on and on, if you knew that they were all going to watch this, what misconception would you like to clarify for them about EDI?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I think I think the first is again, I said it earlier, like if you talk to someone in the space about EDI, they're going to have a painful visceral reaction. And it it doesn't have to be that way. Um, you know, there are solutions out there that can meet your EDI requirements without your company having to throw human beings at the problem or become experts um in a technology that you don't want them to focus on. I think that's that's the big thing is like EDI doesn't have to be painful. You know, it's painful because, you know, of either how you set up those integrations or set up that team on your side, talk to us. Um talk to us. And and at the very least, when folks talk to Orderful, they say one of three things. They can't they say, I can't believe you know this company built this solution. I can't believe this company this solution hasn't existed before. And then of course the third is they say they don't believe it's real. But um, again, we let our customers speak for us, right? You can look at uh what Ivan Ramirez said on on LinkedIn, and maybe we could attach the we could attach his post to this, to this show. But he calls us the Ferrari of EDI, right? Another example, we were able to help him and the Hirschbach team move 150 shipper integrations over. You know, I think that one was 11 months. Um, and and he'll sing our praises without us even without us even asking. And and he's one of you know many customers that will tell you this is a different way to send and receive EDI data. It's it's worth checking out. That's great.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, Jonathan. Um briefly, I'd like to talk about the future of EDI a little bit. What's next? And can EDI be fully integrated? Will that ever happen? Fully automated, I should say.
SPEAKER_00:I think there's two main pain points in EDI. There's the mapping pane, and then there's the testing pane. So we've talked a lot about solving the mapping. And we at Orderful believe we've eliminated EDI mapping. So that's 50% of the problem. The other 50% is the asynchronous back and forth between a retailer and a shipper and their trading partner. That's something that lives in people's heads. It lives in emails. It lives on Zoom and phone calls. It's tribal knowledge. That's something that is very difficult to solve, but the company that solves that will win long term. We're doing some things right now from a data standpoint and from an agentix standpoint to get a lot of that asynchronous behavior into our product, a lot of those retailer and shipper scenarios into our product.
SPEAKER_01:Talk to us a year from now, but we will have eliminated EDI testing in 12 to 18 months. That's impressive.
SPEAKER_02:Now, I want to disclose that I am an investor in Orderful. I mean, I was so impressed with everything. Um the people the plus I personally have experienced uh the problems of EDI, so I knew it was an issue. Um I was surprised there hadn't been more progress made in the world. So I was happy to see Orderful had made that progress, but I was really impressed with your engineering team as well. And um what are they innovating behind the scenes now?
SPEAKER_00:Well, I I'm impressed by them too. It's you know, our CTO peers is one of the reasons I I came to orderful. Um, you know, before I I before I talk about like what they're they're innovating on, you can tell you can tell what people believe at a startup by how long engineers have been at the company. On average, our engineers have been here for three and a half years. They're great people, and they're not here for charity. They're here because they're solving the testing and mapping problem with EDI and they see the opportunity that's ahead with orderful. Um, but it's something I'm really proud of is their tenure. Um, and so recently we're we're we've released Mosaic, which is our, which is that simple API schema that has eliminated EDI mapping. Um but what we said earlier was getting those testing scenarios and getting that asynchronous communication, getting it in a core data source and understanding how to eliminate testing. That's the problem that they're working on right now.
SPEAKER_01:And I'm I'm smiling talking about it. Um and yeah, let's let's talk in in 12 to 18 months.
SPEAKER_02:Well, Jonathan, this has been great. Um, thank you for sharing your incredible experience and knowledge with us about EDI. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Great, uh great to talk to you, Matt.