For years, supplier enablement mostly meant getting suppliers onto EDI. That works for suppliers with the systems and staff to run it, but many suppliers, including large and sophisticated ones, don’t exchange EDI with every customer. Without a way to bring them in, their orders, changes and invoices stay in email, phone calls and spreadsheets, outside the buyer’s procure-to-pay controls.
Today, supplier enablement usually combines several channels:
- EDI or API for fully integrated suppliers
- Web and mobile workflows for non-EDI trading partners
- Validated spreadsheet uploads for high-volume lines
- Document digitization for suppliers that keep sending PDFs
The common pitfall is enabling suppliers into a separate tool that runs its own process. If web-entered documents don’t follow the same rules as EDI ones, the buyer ends up with two standards and two sets of exceptions. Hybrid trading partners, which send some documents by EDI and others another way, make this especially visible.