What to do about customers who will never send EDI

Two orders reach the desk on the same Wednesday morning. One comes from a national retail chain by EDI and is already in the ERP before anyone has finished their coffee. The other comes from a family-owned hardware store in Waxahachie. It is a photo of a handwritten list, sent from the owner’s phone at 6:15 a.m. with the subject line “order.”

The first order costs your team nothing. The second costs someone 20 minutes, a phone call to ask what “the blue ones” means and a nagging worry that it will slip if the morning gets busy. Yet the hardware store pays on time, has bought from you for 11 years and will never set up EDI.

This guide is about that second kind of customer: why they won’t change, what it costs to handle them by hand and how to give their orders the same care as the big accounts get, without asking them to do anything different.

Two kinds of customers, one order desk

EDI is a direct order feed between your system and a large customer’s system, set up once to a format you both agree on. For big-box retailers and national chains it is often part of the deal. For the accounts that use it, it works. Orders arrive in a shape your ERP expects and nobody types anything.

The trouble is everyone else. Sort your customer list by order count rather than revenue. Near the top you will usually find a handful of large trading partners on EDI. Below them sits a long column of smaller accounts: the contractor who emails a spreadsheet every Monday, the restaurant group that sends a PDF from its accounting system, the regional chain whose buyer types quantities straight into an email. Together they can send more orders than the big accounts do, one small order at a time.

Why small customers won’t switch

It is tempting to think the answer is to move everyone onto EDI. For most of these customers it never happens, and the reasons are good ones.

• It isn’t worth it for them. Setting up EDI takes time and someone who understands it. A five-person office that orders twice a month will not take that on for one supplier.
• They buy from many suppliers. If each one asked for a different setup, the buyer would spend more time on ordering than on running the business. Email works with all of them.
• Their orders start wherever they are. A superintendent on a jobsite snaps a photo of a list. A kitchen manager types an order after close. Neither is sitting at a system built to send EDI.
• A login is one more password. Ask buyers to key orders on your website and plenty will try it once, then drift back to email.
• Pushing too hard can cost the account. A customer told to change how they order may simply order from someone who doesn’t ask.

So most distributors end up running two order desks without meaning to. One is quiet and automatic. The other is a person, an inbox and a lot of retyping.

What the second desk costs

The obvious cost is time. Every emailed order gets opened, read, tied to an account and keyed line by line. A three-line reorder takes a few minutes. A spreadsheet with forty rows of the customer’s own item numbers can eat most of an hour.

The quieter cost is that the two desks don’t hold orders to the same standard. EDI orders arrive in the same agreed format every time, so they get checked the same way every time. Emailed orders get checked as well as the person keying them has time for. On a slow afternoon that means every line. On the Monday after a holiday weekend, it means whatever gets noticed.

That gap shows up as wrong items sent to small accounts, a missed price change that turns into a short payment or a delivery sent to the old address. It also shows up as chasing calls. The national chain knows its order landed because its own system says so. The hardware store owner only knows when somebody calls back.

Then there is who holds it together. Usually it is one or two people who know which customer means cases when they write “10” and which one always forgets the PO number. When they’re out, the second desk slows to a crawl.

To put a figure on the time alone, start from your own numbers. As an example, say two people each spend about 8 hours a week keying orders from customers who email rather than send EDI, at a loaded cost of $28 an hour. Swap in your own team size, hours and rate.

People doing it

2

Hours each, per week

8

Loaded cost per hour

$28

Hours per month

69

Cost per year

$23,296

Hours back per month

35–49

An estimate from the numbers above, not a client result. It assumes 50%–70% of the work can be taken off your team; your audit checks that against your own numbers.

In that example, 832 hours a year go into typing for the accounts that will never send EDI. That is before a single reship or chasing call is counted.

One queue for every order, whatever door it came through

The fix is not to turn small customers into EDI customers. It is to stop treating their orders differently once they reach you. Here is how an emailed order travels once that second desk is taken off your team’s plate. Your customers keep ordering the way they do today, and your EDI feed stays exactly as it is.

1. The email is read whatever is attached. A PDF, a spreadsheet, a photo of a handwritten list or a few lines typed in the body: each one is read for what the customer is asking for.
2. It is matched to the right customer, items, units and prices. The sender becomes the right account. “The blue ones” and the customer’s own item numbers become your items. Their units become yours, and the price is compared with what that customer pays.
3. It gets the same checks your EDI orders get. Is the ship-to on file? Is the quantity in line with what they usually buy? Is the item still active? Whatever your team checks today is written down once and asked of every order.
4. Clean orders join the EDI orders in one queue. They go into your ERP ready to fill, or wait there for approval if you prefer. That choice is made per customer.
5. Anything unclear goes to a person with the question marked. The original email sits beside the draft order with the problem named: an item number nobody has seen, a ship-to that isn’t on file, a price below the agreed one.
6. The answer is kept. Once someone confirms what “the blue ones” means for that store, the same question doesn’t come back next week.

By midmorning the warehouse sees one list of orders. Nothing on it says which ones came by EDI and which arrived as a phone photo, because by then it doesn’t matter.

Small accounts get the same care as big ones

Small customers notice when they come second. Their order is confirmed a day after the big chain’s. Their wrong shipment takes a week to sort out. Nobody says it out loud, but a competitor who answers faster starts to look tempting.

Running every order through one set of checks changes that. The hardware store’s order can go in the same day as the national chain’s. Its prices are compared just as closely. Its odd cases reach a person who can see exactly what is in question, instead of getting buried under a stack of routine orders.

Approval helps while trust builds. For the first weeks, emailed orders from each starting customer can wait in your ERP for someone to look over. Accounts whose orders keep coming through clean can then go straight in. A customer who sends messy lists can stay on approval as long as you like.

And each answer your team gives makes the next order easier. What lived in one person’s memory, like which store means cases and which means eaches, ends up written down where the whole desk can see it.

Big-box warehouses south of Dallas, small orders in the inbox

Both kinds of customer sit close together in Dallas–Fort Worth. In October 2023, a national retailer opened a 1.5 million square foot fulfillment center in Lancaster, south of Dallas, expected to employ more than 1,000 people, a grocery trade publication reported. A distributor selling into big-box accounts like that sends their orders by EDI, and still opens an inbox each morning full of orders emailed by contractors and independent stores from Waxahachie to Denton.

What changes for your team

Most emailed orders go in the same day they arrive, right alongside the EDI orders. The 6:15 a.m. photo from Waxahachie no longer waits for someone to free up.

Fewer chasing calls. When a small customer does ask, whoever picks up can see where the order stands: entered, waiting for approval or waiting on one question.

Inside sales stops being the typing pool for the small accounts. The hours that went into retyping go to the orders that need a decision and to customers worth a conversation.

Wrong shipments to small accounts get rarer. Unknown item numbers, odd quantities and unfamiliar ship-tos stop as questions before anything reaches the warehouse.

Nobody has to talk a loyal customer into changing how they order. They keep emailing, and they get the same care as your biggest account.

And the quirks of every customer end up written down, so a sick day no longer means the small accounts wait.

For other order problems distributors run into, see our guides for distributors. For a full walk-through of emailed POs in any ERP, read how distributors stop retyping emailed purchase orders. To see how a project is scoped, read how we work with distributors.

Where to start

Start with the customers who cost the most time.

1. Sort customers by how they order. List which accounts send EDI and which email. Note how many orders each group sends in a typical week.
2. Pick the emailing customers who order most often. Their formats are the ones your team keys most, so they pay back first.
3. Write down what gets checked. The checks EDI orders get today become the rules for every order, along with the ones your team runs from memory.
4. Choose approval per customer. Decide which starting accounts wait for approval and which go straight in.
5. Go live, then widen. Your first workflow goes live within 14 days of access to your tools. Add customers as their orders run clean.

It runs on the tools you already use: your ERP, your EDI setup and the inbox customers already send to. The first step is a free 20-minute audit call about how orders reach you now. You get a written plan within 48 hours and a fixed-scope quote after the audit.