Logistics is a wide area of business including supply chain management, distribution, production, and material movement that require movement of both tangible products and data. These data consist of documents and information related to consignments that require secure delivery after a careful audit, within critical deadlines that need to be met to keep the supply chain active. The sharing of information does not limit to business partners but also includes internal departments as well as governments.
There can be certain tasks that a user expects from adopting a managed file transfer solution. Starting from ensuring security and probity while transmitting files, automating and managing file transfers through a graphical interface, streamlining file transfer processes and workflows accordingly; till controlling access to sensitive documents including user and group roles are, a few areas that can be listed as important.
Since manufacturing, distribution, and supply are crucial areas in logistics, there can be various regulations depending on geographies or industries that need to be followed during trading activities. Apart from the compliance requirement; automation and proper recording of transactions are important to these sectors just as retail or any other. As the supply chain grows and more trading partners are added, the number of files that are being exchanged also increases over time. This not only leads to scalability concerns but also onboarding a larger number of trading partners can be challenging, causing delays in business progress. This is one major reason why these industries adopt an MFT solution to standardize the processes and ease the management of trading partners. Hence, selecting the most suitable MFT solution depends on the support and compatibility with your desired secure protocols such as AS2, AS4, SFTP, FTP, etc., use of industry-accepted encryption methods, ability to run on multiple platforms, and ability to convert data to and from industry approved formats such as EDI and XML.
Automated secure B2B file transfer to assure end-to-end delivery of EDI documents can be exciting when the MFT service is ideally a cloud EDI built on AWS or any other cloud provider that offers high scalability and availability, resiliency, and ubiquity. As it comes with serverless native pricing and zero maintenance efforts, it is very beneficial for large enterprises looking for an appropriate tool to handle large message volumes across various geo markets. As the current pandemic situation has been a great learning experience for the industry, with the lockdowns hindering the operations of cargo and freight providers, a serverless MFT can be a ray of hope to get the transactions and business communications going, regardless of physical delays.
An MFT that is supportive of the EDI logistics integration process that helps to coordinate between air freight, cargo, trucking, third party logistics, and the entire supply chain; ultimately boosts the growth and profitability while enhancing the customer experience through continuous improvements made to the operating models to ensure secure and reliable managed file transfer for B2B trading.
