While manufacturers often claim that it’s difficult to do business with smaller independent distributors, large corporate customers can be much harder to deal with.

Sure, the big guys are more tech-savvy and have moved faster to digitize their operations. This can come at a price.

Large companies often have very rigid EDI standards.

They adopt unique, mandatory fields not used by other customers or used in different ways. They include additional file types not supported in basic EDI packages, which make integration difficult.

They are often less open to adapting their own systems to meet yours, insisting that you make changes in order to do business with them. They may change their systems or system requirements more frequently than other customers.

The extra work is justified by the size of their orders, but it is worth pointing out the opportunity cost they represent.

By spending so much time and energy on the big customers, the smaller ones can get ignored.

Even if combined they represent a significant revenue stream, individually they do not. Initiatives to connect digitally get delayed or cancelled as the IT team focuses on whatever change requests have been put forward by the big guys this month.

The full benefits of digitalization cannot be realized unless all your trading partners do business electronically. A platform like Supply Cloud allows you to connect with all your partners quickly and equally.

Supply Cloud’s one-to-many architecture solves the problem of big customers.

Regardless of how often your customers change their systems, formats, or data protocols, you can simply keep sending your files the way you always have and let Supply Cloud’s OneConnect technology do the rest.

With Supply Cloud, you can take care of your customers while Supply Cloud takes care of the data.