RON: There are some interesting edge cases per industry where, like you said, a lot of our clients end up being buying groups. In many cases they will do drop ships, and whenever they're doing drop shipping, they tend to have sophisticated ordering models where they're having to do split-shipping and split-payment because it is a group purchasing organization, or buying group.
And by its nature you're going to see these relatively complex scenarios. EDI can handle that perfectly. And it's excellent for handling those types of scenarios. And what's really cool is, we can dynamically split out these complex orders and then send them out to the manufacturers or the distributors who are going to be placing the order with dynamically.
That is so powerful, as a buyers group platform, to be able to scale up and know that this process is completely locked in. And the more orders you get, the better it is. You don't have to staff up more, etc. Similarly, like you were saying with the inventory, another example that we've worked in extensively with EDI eCommerce, is dealing with companies that have maybe multiple organizations, multiple legal entities that are transferring stock between them.
Or they might have multiple locations. So we'll do the buy online pick up and store (BOPIS). There's some mechanical accounting that has to happen to take care of all the back-office accounting, all the inventory management. Maybe there's a store transfer that we need to do where the item is actually being fulfilled from a warehouse and it goes on to a truck. And that truck is in the distribution network for this multi-location retail arm of a company.
We've done this before where there's a direct drop shipping component of a company and then a retail arm of the company. And there may be different organizations such as the group shopping platforms we've discussed throughout this webinar series.. You can see how complicated this can get when you're trying to scale everything rapidly.
That is the beauty of EDI. We can sit down with you in the discovery process, go through what the specific workflow is, document that out, and then execute on that using EDI in eCommerce. It's so powerful.
One more example that I want to briefly share is the medical space, and these are just examples that get you thinking about scenarios that might apply for you, and in particular encourage you to think about the possibilities with EDI. You may not have been exposed to all of these concepts and we just want to encourage you. There's probably a lot that's possible that can be automated that you may not just be aware of yet, and we'll also include links in the description so you can dig in if you'd like, either by contacting us or by looking at additional resources with more detail.
In the medical space, including medical group buying platforms, it's pretty interesting because a lot of the EDI has its own format, It’s HL7v2, HL7v3, it's essentially an EDI type of model, but tailored to the medical space. It's really powerful because this flat-file format is standardized across the entire industry. There are some really incredible things you can do. If you're not aware of these, they includes things like being able to look at patient information, appointments, detailed records, and transferring these detailed records. But you can also do some pretty powerful things with inventory management, making sure that the steps of a procedure are available.
It gets very granular as to what you can automate and set things up so that, whenever we get a patient in and it's this type of patient, we have this workflow kick off and then we reorder inventory because we know we need this testing device. Maybe it's a blood test and an x-ray or something because it's this type of patient. Okay, well, like you said, Ron, go in back, order those supplies or reorder them, etc.
Being able to do these things in each particular space in your industry for your buyers groups, it can be what allows you to put your focus into growing your business instead of dealing with all the logistics.
RON: I'm sitting here, as you're talking, coming up with all these ideas. I'm remembering back in the day, back in the early 90s, I was the director of IT at WordPerfect. And back then, we really didn't have an ability to connect to all of our third-party vendors that we dealt with. And so one of the things that we had with our email system back then called GroupWise was an async gateway. It was an inbound and outbound mailbox, and you could send these flat files, you could email to it, you could fax to it, you could do anything to it.
Basically, it was like a VAN back in the day, where, any time I went out to integrate a client‘s site—and I was rolling out big sites like we were doing Chrysler and the Postal Service and Callaway Golf and Shell Oil—every time I'd go out there and they would say, “Well, we have this third-party machine and we have no idea when it's down. “ And I'm like, “Well, when it goes down, does it send a file?” They’d say, “Yes.” “OK, well, great. Well, let's send that file.”
And I would just point it at the async gateway and give it an inbound queue. And we could automate the reporting and basically the forwarding of these files, either through email or appointments or reporting system or anything. Back in the day, 30-something years ago, back then it was almost like an EDI, but it was for a communication system, which is what we're doing.