For decades, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been the backbone of supply chain communication, allowing businesses to exchange standardized documents such as purchase orders and invoices. But in today’s fast-moving, highly collaborative supply chain environment, EDI is showing its age. EDI is rigid, costly to implement, and struggles to handle the complexity of modern external manufacturing and supplier networks.
Consider the modern external manufacturing network of today’s large brand manufacturers. With an average of 30% of manufacturing activity outsourced to external partners, this number represents a significant amount of revenue dependent on trading partners operating outside the brand’s four walls.
When taking into account the number of order changes, inventory movement updates, and external factors shifting deadlines and schedules, brand manufacturers can no longer afford high-latency, low-fidelity data passing through its external network. The risks for delayed orders, inefficient processes, and expedited order costs are too great to maintain market competitiveness. Brand manufacturers need a system that can effectively enable dynamic, real-time collaboration with multiple trading partners.
Enter Multi-Enterprise Interoperability (MEI)—a new paradigm designed for the realities of today’s interconnected supply chains. MEI goes beyond static data exchange to enable real-time, dynamic collaboration across multiple organizations, unlocking the agility, responsiveness, and visibility businesses need to thrive.
Below, I hope to shed more light on why EDI is inadequate for today’s external manufacturing networks, and why it’s time for supply chains to evolve from EDI to MEI.
Why EDI Falls Short for Supply Chains
EDI was originally built for a simpler time, when supply chains were more linear and relationships were more transactional. But now, businesses operate in multi-tier, multi-partner ecosystems where real-time coordination is critical. Here is where EDI fails:
- High Latency in Data Exchange – EDI transactions often operate in batch processing mode, leading to delays in critical updates.
- Lack of Context and Visibility – EDI transmits structured data but doesn’t offer the contextual insights needed to make fast, informed decisions.
- Bloated Integration Costs – EDI requires custom mapping between partners, making connections expensive, brittle, and inflexible to change. Further, EDI integration development is also bottlenecked by the availability of a few IT experts, resulting in lead times often exceeding 6 months for even simple changes to an integration.
- Dated Technology – Applications that leverage advanced capabilities (such as generative AI) don’t support legacy integration technologies such as EDI.
- Limited Adaptability – Supply chains need to react instantly to disruptions, but EDI lacks two-way, real-time interaction capabilities.
MEI: The Future of Supply Chain Collaboration
Multi-Enterprise Interoperability (MEI) transforms supply chain connectivity from a static exchange of documents to a dynamic, shared operational environment where manufacturers, co-packers, logistics providers, and retailers can interact in real time.
With MEI, companies gain:
✅ Real-time collaboration – Cloud-native platforms enable partners to interact instantly, aligning production, logistics, and inventory decisions on the fly.
✅ Full supply chain visibility – Instead of just sending data, MEI platforms provide actionable intelligence, predictive analytics, and live tracking.
✅ Seamless integration – API-based connectivity makes it easier to onboard new partners without complex, expensive system integrations.
✅ Resilience and agility – When disruptions happen, MEI allows companies to adapt quickly, rather than waiting for the next EDI file transfer.
In other words, EDI alone as a simple protocol doesn’t offer interoperability. With MEI, you have a strategy in place to enable true dynamic collaboration between trading partners,
How MEI Offers Value to Extended Supply Chains
Much like how human communication evolved from letter mail, to landlines, to the Internet, communication within supply chains must also keep pace with the demands of the modern era.
As external manufacturing, contract packaging, and supplier networks become more complex, businesses need more than EDI—they need real-time multi-party synchronization that enables agility. MEI is not just a technology shift; it’s a fundamental rethinking of how supply chains operate.
At Nulogy, customers tell us stories time and again of their transformative experiences shifting away from EDI to MEI. Rather than spending years of time, capital, and effort on lengthy EDI implementation projects, for instance, an MEI platform is able to accelerate time to value for customers through its scalability and seamless, API-based interoperability with S4/HANA-based systems as well as modern Advanced Planning Systems (APS) such as Kinaxis and OMP. MEI platforms are purpose-built to be nimble and flexible in order to best enable real-time connectivity between a brand manufacturer and its trading partners.
Prepare for the Future with MEI
As supply chains continue to ride the waves of market volatility and consumer demand, companies embracing MEI will gain a competitive advantage by making better, faster decisions and ensuring their entire supply ecosystem is aligned for greater responsiveness and shared success. The shift is already happening—will your supply chain keep up?
