Integrating EDI, bar coding, and business systems

By Staff -- Modern Materials Handling, 11/1/2000

The integration of electronic data interchange (EDI), bar coding, and business systems is a must for high productivity and decreased costs. It's also a base requirement for doing business in the automotive industry.

At the Auto-Tech 2000 conference, Larry Graham, General Motors Corp., and Lee Pittman, Future Three, Inc., said the objective in the integration of these systems is to eliminate errors and provide data in an accurate and timely manner.

They say errors are an enormous hidden cost of business. Bad data requires human intervention, and in many cases, may never be corrected. Therefore, the solution is to integrate. Additional benefits include improved customer service and inventory accuracy at all stages of the supply chain.

To help achieve this integration, GM is currently rolling out the common global trading partner shipping label template.

By standardizing on shipping labels, GM expects to reduce training requirements, promote error proofing, and eliminate unnecessary information lookup procedures.

A joint effort is underway between the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) and its European counterpart, Odette, to incorporate the template throughout the automotive industry supply chain to further reduce costs.