Let’s face it: the more money you want to spend, the more likely it is that a solid ROI will be needed by the business to provide funding. If you’re talking about spending a million dollars implementing EDI software and building an EDI team, trust me, you’ll need one. It’s more of a grey area when you’re planning to do the bare minimum to satisfy a customer EDI mandate or even to implement additional partners onto an existing platform.  I think there are a limited number of scenarios you should consider when looking at ROI requirements, including:

In early August we discussed the topic of return on investment (ROI) for the EDI program which was enough to pique my focus back on the subject. Admittedly over many years I was caught up in the day to day operations of an EDI program and focused heavily on the transactional requirements without much outside the box thought on true KPI’s. Sure I could rehash the some old ambiguous benefits of cost savings, efficiencies, and the like to anyone that asked, but just stating that didn’t seem to hold water anymore. After letting the topic simmer in my head in August, I came to a full realization that somehow I was not considering every angle of the true benefits of an EDI program.