A Modern Approach to EDI with Jonathan Kish and Joe Lynch

Joe Lynch, host of The Logistics of Logistics Podcast, discusses a modern approach to EDI with Jonathan Kish, Vice President of Business Development at Orderful. Listen to the podcast or read below to learn about EDI and EDI integration challenges. Orderful’s self-service API eliminates the need to build point-to-point EDI integrations, reduces costs, and decreases time to onboard new trading partners by 80%.

Welcome to the Logistics of Logistics, a podcast dedicated to exploring how things get places and the people who get them there. We’ll talk with logistics and supply chain leaders about innovation, industry trends, and the future of the logistics business. Now, here’s your host, Joe Lynch. Hello friends. Welcome to the Logistics of Logistics podcast. My name is Joe Lynch, thank you so much for joining us today. Today’s topic is a modern approach to EDI with my friend Jonathan Kish. How’s it going Jonathan?

Jonathan Kish, Vice President of Business Development, Orderful

It’s going really well. How are you Joe?

Joe Lynch

Doing great. Jonathan and I are old friends and he’s been on the podcast before and I’m very excited to talk about this topic. And I know some of you are going, oh my god, EDI. I’m not a techie. I don’t know how this works. We’ll cover the basics, but Jonathan and his company have some really interesting stuff going on. And I think it’s really going to simplify some of the challenges we’ve had with EDI, since I think the 1800s. So Jonathan, please introduce yourself and your company, and where you’re calling from today.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the introduction, Joe. I’m Jonathan Kish, Vice President of Business Development at Orderful. So we’re a modern EDI API. Before that, I spent the first 10 years of my career on the supply chain technology side, but mostly focused on direct to consumer. So selling to companies.

Joe Lynch

Before you go there. What is the name of your company again?

Jonathan Kish

Orderful.

Joe Lynch

So that’s Orderful. Okay. And where are you calling from?

Jonathan Kish

I am calling from Denver, Colorado.

Joe Lynch

You moved? You used to live in Seattle last time we talked.

Jonathan Kish

150 episodes ago, I was in Seattle, and I was a single man, but now I’m married with a wife and dog and in the sunshine state.

Joe Lynch

Which is what? The sunshine state is Florida.

Jonathan Kish

No, that’s what people think – we get 300 beautiful days.

Joe Lynch

In Colorado? Okay. Very nice. Yeah, that’s a beautiful place. So anyway, what does Orderful do?

Jonathan Kish

Yeah. So at the core, there’s three main components of what we do. So at a high level, we reduce the time it takes to onboard trading partnerships by 80%. Because our solution is a modern, REST based scalable API, that someone can actually do EDI integrations in a self-service manner without needing hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure or technology or domain knowledge to maintain on their own.

Joe Lynch

Interesting. So, I know this, some of that sounded like technobabble to me, but we’ll come back to that in a minute. But the thing that impresses me about what you said is the 80% reduction in time because I think we’ve all been used to trading partners. So whether you’re a manufacturer or retailer, distributor, or logistics company, I’ve been through that where you say, well, we just have to connect our systems, and that old EDI has to somehow connect with our new system. And we need to find somebody who can do that for us, and they won’t be available for eight weeks. And then they’ll take eight weeks or 10 weeks or five years to connect those systems. It seems like it’s a forever, super expensive, and very difficult process. And so when you called me I don’t know, a month ago, when we first started talking about this, I was like, Oh, I’m not a tech guy. But, I’ve been through enough projects where you just seem to stumble when it seems like we’ve made the deal. We’re gonna start working together and now we’ve got to connect the systems and you bring in the tech guys, and all of a sudden it becomes months long integration.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, think if you’re a manufacturer, and you land a huge contract with Target or Walmart, or you name the retailer, you should be celebrating. This should be like a moment of joy, right? Like, this is revenue coming into your company. But what happens is immediately you say, oh, I need to figure out a way to actually communicate.

Joe Lynch

I gotta go down the hall and find the tech guy, and have him break the bad news to me, because that’s what he does. Anyway, we’ll come back to that. And again, guys, if you’re up for it, I think this is a really cool thing, but stick around because we will also cover some of the basics about EDI and API. And why this problem still exists? Because everything else kind of connects with a click, you know, you go, I walk into a strange place and my phone connects to the Wifi. Life has gotten very easy. The integrations we have and the connections we have are all like boom done. Yet when you say the word EDI and API everyone goes, oh no, here we go. So, anyway, Jonathan, a little bit about you, you started talking about your career. But first tell us where you grew up. Where did you go to school and give us some career highlights before you joined the mighty Orderful.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, I grew up in Buffalo, New York. So shout out to your Buffalo Bills’ listeners. I went to a school called SUNY Geneseo and I studied political science. But, you know, shortly after that I realized I have a passion for go-to-market business development sales. And then this logistics onion just peels back and back. And every time you think you know, something, you know, you learn about another layer.

Joe Lynch

Oh, by the way, I remember the last time you were on my podcast, it seems a few years ago, you told me once, maybe it was offline, that you gave a shot at being a comedian for a little while. Tell us about that.

Jonathan Kish

I did. Yeah, I mean, it’s more distant as the years go on. What I’ll say is I was so good at being a comedian that now I’m the vice president of business development.

Joe Lynch

Well, I’ve had some of the people on my podcast who said something similar. And I think it certainly doesn’t hurt to have that personality going. And maybe you’re not screwed up enough to be a good comedian, like a career. Because it seems like every time you hear one of those guys talk, they’re like, oh, man, it’s got some problems going on.

Jonathan Kish

I’ll tell myself that, but it’s because I’m not screwed up. And that’s good.

Joe Lynch

So after you left school, would you tell us a few jobs you did before you joined Orderful? And then why did you join Orderful?

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, so like I was saying in the beginning, I feel like I’ve done everything on the supply chain and technology side. So you know, selling door to door to small and medium businesses for UPS in the Midwest, to eventually selling shipping software for the Octane formerly stamps.com family of products.

Joe Lynch

Oh wow!

Jonathan Kish

Yeah. And that was an amazing experience, right? Learned about APIs.

Joe Lynch

That’s a rocketship over there.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, they did really well. And then most recently, was one of the business development leaders at Shippo, from Series B to Series Z, and was really proud of being one of the people who pushed us for more of an application based UI focused product to a platform API for technology companies.

Joe Lynch

I’m not so sure what that means. But it sounds impressive, Jonathan. So, you’ve done very well in your career, you had lots of options. Why did you join Orderful?

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, that’s a great question. So really, it boiled down to two reasons. The first is, because I’ve been so focused on direct to consumer. Specifically on the parcel side, you know, that last year of having conversations with people who are trying to solve for direct to consumer, ecommerce shipping, it became a little bit repetitive for me, and I needed a new challenge. And something that was a blind spot in my own education was B2B. And EDI is the backbone of all B2B transportation and commerce in the country and in the world. The second reason was our CEO, Erik, and I learned how this problem runs through his veins and is in his blood. He was building these point-to-point integrations for customers before and had the realization, this is ridiculous. I’m charging people too much for this. And it’s not repetitive at all. And he was huge in bringing me over because he built the solution the industry has been asking for for 20 years.

Joe Lynch

And so you alluded to a problem. What is the problem with EDI?

Jonathan Kish

The problem with EDI. So at a high level, right? It’s been around since the 1960s.

Joe Lynch

Well, I thought it was from the 1800s. That’s what I was always told.

Jonathan Kish

No, not that far. I think the airplane was before that. But no, it’s been around since the 60s, originally developed by the US Army. And it’s a really secure way for businesses to send and receive information from each other. The problem with it as opposed to an API, which anyone can integrate to and start communicating and maintain really easily, is there is no single source of truth for EDI. So in the United States, a lot of people run on the backbone of X12, which is the domestic version of EDI but in Europe it’s EDIFACT. And then in each of those buckets, the leaders, or the people who set requirements, a Walmart, an Amazon or Target, have their own version of EDI.

Joe Lynch

Okay. So when you say no, there’s no single source of truth, what you mean is there’s no standard. Everybody has their own standard of EDI and what does EDI do for me? It’s connection right? It connects one system to another. Communication, right?

Jonathan Kish

Communication and a good example is, I’m Best Buy. I’m going to do business with Joe Lynch Incorporated. I’m going to send you a purchase order, and you’re going to communicate all of the, we call it scenarios, going back and forth between Best Buy and Joe Lynch Incorporated, that goes into that purchase order. So you’re updating them on the shipment information. They’re eventually sending payment potentially down the road. So all of that stuff that goes into that relationship is sent over EDI.

Joe Lynch

So this is where I think I have a problem. And I want you to hopefully clarify some things. So when I hear API, what I’ve always been told is that it’s a constant communication. It’s back and forth. And then there’s EDI, which is the older version, but it’s still used in many places. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But somebody described it this way, if I went to a restaurant, I sat down at the table, the waitress came over, took my order, walked it back to the cook and gave my order to the cook. The cook then started making the food and then she brought it back, that’s an EDI, right? So there’s kind of these set milestones. And API would be more like I sat at the counter and the cook was right there. And when we’re communicating back and forth, and I’d say, hey, give us some more pancakes. And so that obviously is not necessarily based on milestones, always open. That’s what I’ve always heard. So API seems like and I used to joke about on my podcast, because people would always just say, well, we have an API for that. Like it was miracle glue. And I always would say, I don’t understand why we haven’t moved everything. Oh, by the way, please explain. I gave my very layman’s terms about what EDI versus API is. Please elaborate on that first. And then I have another question for you.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, you know, I was thinking about your analogy. But API is just another way for businesses to communicate information to and from each other, usually calling like a database. So at Shippo, it was shipping rates, shipping information, rate cards, etc, that our customers would call our API to receive. And it’s the preferred way people do business. Because if you’ve ever met a young person who’s learning how to code, usually they’re learning JSON XML, usually in the REST versions not so base like you don’t really hear people learning about EDI integration.

Joe Lynch

So those first two things you said use APIs?

Jonathan Kish

Those use APIs. Exactly.

Joe Lynch

So why do we still have EDI then?

Jonathan Kish

It’s because you know, we were talking about TMS systems, right? The person who bought the Transportation Management System. It was a $100 million company, right?

Joe Lynch

So you wouldn’t buy it unless you had a lot of freight. Ma and Pa weren’t buying a TMS 30 years ago.

Jonathan Kish

Yep. So you have companies like Walmart, like Amazon, like Target that have built their supplier and vendor network around EDI communications. And so we still have it. Because even as an example, if Target or Ford said, we’re no longer using EDI for our vendor supplier network, that would only mean that that specific retailer or company is turning off EDI. It would take every company that runs on EDI to stop using it for it to go away.

Joe Lynch

Basically, I’m going to put it in my terms so hopefully I understand this, we use EDI because it’s been around for a long time. And the people who are using it might have invested quite a bit of their resources into that. So it’s legacy systems and somebody says, hey, Ford Motor Company or Procter and Gamble or Walmart, just get rid of that old system that you have billions of transactions in an upgrade to this new one. And you won’t have to have EDI anymore. Well, they say, nah, that’s not gonna happen overnight, or maybe not in the next 10 years. But now I’ve got a company that has to connect and so it becomes the supplier’s problem to get connected to Walmart or Ford or Procter and Gamble.

Jonathan Kish

Exactly. It’s a decade’s long and, you know, millions of dollars of tech debt that is into this. Yep.

Joe Lynch

And so I understand that because this is a problem we have at the guys from JBF Consulting, and we talked about transportation management systems. And they said there were a whole bunch of companies that the biggest companies in the world were the first ones to buy transportation management systems. And they might have been on premise, right? Meaning the servers out in the hallway or in a separate room that has to be specially cooled and has a special team that serves that server, like it’s a God. And then when there was some consolidation in the space, the new company say’s, we’re not going to support that on premise system anymore. We’re going to move everything to the cloud. Well, these were, again, people who bought Transportation Management Systems early, probably large companies, and had, again, a billion transactions in there. So it was not an easy decision to say, yeah, we’ll just make that upgrade over the weekend, no, that’s an enormous investment and risky. Let’s face it’s risky. So that’s the reason Orderful exists, because EDI exists, and it’s going to exist for the foreseeable future. And that’s not a bad thing. The bad thing is a lot of people, and I’m gonna say supply chain people, logistics people, manufacturing people, retail people, anyone who has trading partners struggle to get that integration. So talk about how long that integration might take without a tool like Orderful.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, yeah. So there’s really two ways somebody was doing this before Orderful existed. One is on their own, that takes anywhere from eight to 12 weeks, per integration.

Joe Lynch

What does that integration actually mean? Is that just coding?

Jonathan Kish

Well, it’s a couple of things. So one is, again, let’s use Best Buy and Joe Lynch in the example. So you sign the contract. The first thing you need to get to trade with Best Buy is you need to get their requirements or what Orderful calls guidelines. And it’s usually a PDF document. And you need to hand this to your developer, who by the way, is used to reading XML.

Joe Lynch

He’s used to the API thing, he’s probably in his 20s, 30s, 40s. Right?

Jonathan Kish

Exactly, he or she has to understand them, that’s going to take one to two weeks, find a way to digitize them on your backside, and then actually then begin testing outside your source of truth with the retailer or with the actual person who sets the guidelines. Now that testing isn’t like it would be if you used a Stripe, Twilio or Shippo, where you make a call, and they return a response right away. No, the testing is sending a screenshot of your code to Best Buy, and then them taking a week to two weeks to respond to you and say this looks right, this looks okay, etc. That’s how it’s being done today. And then oh, by the way, after they finally approve that partnership to go live with with Best Buy you, Joe Lynch Incorporated, then have to figure out how to send that information to Best Buy. So it could be a VAN, it could be an FTP.

Joe Lynch

When you said VAN when we’re prepping, I was like I thought you meant drive it.

Jonathan Kish

At some point VANS will go away. But it’s just a way that some retailers, some leaders, some requirements setters want to receive the information from their supplier.

Joe Lynch

Right.

Jonathan Kish

So you know, as opposed to it being HTTP, which is a lot of the ways that APIs communicate, some of the legacy retailers like to prefer VAN for security and other reasons.

Joe Lynch

So these are obviously very tech centric things we’re talking about. But the big challenge to most people who listen to my podcast, shippers or logistics guys, maybe technology guys, who would understand more of this, but when I think about this is I’ve been through this where you have to go find a very specialized skill set. And it’s not always on staff, and then you have to pay them to do it first. And I don’t know if it’s called this all the time, but like a prototype environment, test it out and then go live at some point. And when it goes live, if better work. Otherwise, you’ve already lost credibility with your new customer, right?

Jonathan Kish

You need to find a unicorn, somebody who understands code knows how to maintain infrastructure, but also likes to read and send emails and that person is few and far between. And I would say that’s the easier way to build these integrations. And that’s the faster way, you know, the other historical ways, kind of using some of the legacy providers, not to name names, but but they’re publicly traded, and we know them, and they more act as a professional services arm, and you go to them and you say, excuse me, you know, Mr. company, I’d like to add BestBuy as a trading partner. And then it takes them anywhere from two months to a year to build that integration, because they’re being asked by hundreds of thousands of people every day to add trading partners, and they’re going through the same stuff, right?

Joe Lynch

It’s a funny thing, Jonathan, because when I think about, you know, I’ve just mentioned to the people on my podcast lately, so I think of my friends over at Turbo, they have a transportation management system. But then when somebody comes up with a new, we’ll call it the new killer app, they just connect to Turbo with a simple API. So if you’re using Turbo, you just say I would like to connect to green screens. And those are modern systems and they connect pretty quickly. So as this customer you don’t have to go through any six months or $10,000 or $100,000 to do that. It’s just they connect and you might just say, here’s my code, I give it to you. And now it’s working. So when you say trading partners, my thought was, that’s the way we all connect now, but that’s not true when you get to some of these big mainframe systems, wrong way to say it, legacy systems, which by the way, a lot of very large companies are using legacy systems. So you win the dream customer, the Walmart, the Costco, the Target, I don’t know what systems they all use. But there’s a good chance if they’re been around a while they’re using EDI. And then even though it’s going to be a great account, you worked hard to get it, it’s going to be months before it can go live.

Jonathan Kish

It’s going to be months before you go live. And that’s months, you’re not realizing revenue, right? As a manufacturer.

Joe Lynch

Yeah, exactly. Alright boss so let’s switch gears. I know you work for this company Orderful and you say you guys solve that problem. So you become the translator, the connector, I don’t know how you guys describe what you guys do. But to me, I look at you guys as the connector that translates from EDI language to API language or whatever other way to say it, but you connect those systems without it being months. So talk about how you do it, or what you do. And then how you do it.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, yeah. So I’ll start at the high level and then go into specifics. So you connect to our JSON API once. And that is the only real time that you’re going to have to have a developer build one of these integrations. From there, it’s maintained by a business analyst or somebody just changing a few things on the back end to relationships to make them go. But with Orderful, you connect once, and you have access to any trading partner that you need in any communication channel you need. And we do that. So the first thing we do is, we take these guidelines, these requirements that we talked about before, so like using Best Buy as that example. And we digitize them. Now instead of this existing on a PDF file, it’s existing in the cloud. And then we’re converting that. So we’re converting X12, which the retailer has said, or Best Buy has said into JSON. So it’s something your developer can actually read. And then you’re making test calls to an actual API. So all of those emails back and forth about hey, does this code look right? Is this coming through on your side? That goes away with Orderful because the second, we’ve added that and that usually takes hours to a day to add that trading partner, you’re making real time API calls against what Best Buy actually told you they need to see. Which then means once you’ve built that, you can send that information to them outside of Orderful, that should be a clean approval process. And we see that it reduces onboarding time anywhere from three to five weeks, because again, all of those mistakes are going away with our platform. And then finally, when it comes time to actually send those live transactions, if Best Buy tells you they need that sent via AS2 you just select that in our platform, you send the information AS2, you can receive it however you want, and you’re good to go.

Joe Lynch

So contrast the weeks, how long in the traditional way, give me a range, and then give me range for you guys.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, so let’s start with us first, right, because that’s what is more controllable. So to add a new trading partner could take anywhere from two hours to at most a day. So getting those guidelines digitized in our platform, then the testing piece, because you’re testing against live authenticated guidelines, takes usually one to two weeks, two weeks being on the high end. A week to go live. So that puts it at three weeks, and then finally setting up the communication channel, which is the click of a button. So for us, we’re averaging anywhere from five to 21 days to go live with that trading partner. How it works today depends on if it’s outsourced or insource. Let’s say you’re doing it on your own, to understand, to digitize, to figure out those guidelines, that’s a week for you. To do the testing before you actually go to the trading partner that’s anywhere from two weeks to a month to get their approval. That’s another week to two weeks. And then finally to figure out the communication method, that’s another call it one to three weeks on your own.

Joe Lynch

Yeah, so you said 80% reduction in the time.

Jonathan Kish

80% reduction.

Joe Lynch

How much less does it cost?

Jonathan Kish

Well, I mean, we went through this self service model, like there’s cost throughout that entire flow, right, the developer. But the biggest thing is, at the end of the day if we were to do this on our own, and Joe Lynch Incorporated had that Best Buy integration live. Nothing in that integration is reusable for the next trading partner I have to add. So all of that work I did was a single map. Whereas with Orderful when I connected to that API, the Orderful API once, the next trading partner I add can be added with a business user as opposed to a developer.

Joe Lynch

So you guys are probably already connected to Best Buy. So if I become a customer, you already have their requirements. And as soon as I add mine, if I was already added because I was doing business with Costco, you could connect me like that. Right.

Jonathan Kish

Exactly, you would just enter Costco’s ISA ID. And if we’ve traded with them before, we’re gonna give you their guidelines right away. It’s only when it’s a new partnership.

Joe Lynch

But I gotta think that, as we go forward, you’re going to have more and more of those in your system. So to say, hey, don’t worry, we’re already connected.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, our network has grown, I think 5,000% We were looking at the math over the past two quarters. So it’s crazy where it’s coming.

Joe Lynch

That is crazy. And again, I’ve been through projects where there’s all this excitement because you won this business. And then the sobering reality comes in after you’ve celebrated the big customer. You start looking at what the requirements are, and you know, gosh look what we have to go through. And by the way, sometimes that hasn’t been communicated upfront. So the people who made the buy may that they’re purchasing and the sales guys, they don’t understand, well, I think more now than ever before. They don’t recognize the effort required and the people required, and the money required the time required to make that work. They just said, we made a deal. Jonathan and Joe shaked hands and said yes. And now we go back. And the Yes is delayed by 10 weeks, a year, whatever it is. And, and worse than that, I mentioned the cost. The real cost isn’t your programming cost, the fact that I can’t do business with Best Buy now for three months or four months, or however long it takes.

Jonathan Kish

Yep. I think one thing that’s really important to everyone who works for Orderful is kind of democratizing and leveling the playing field. So there’s a huge barrier to entry. And we’ve described that to be able to trade with Costco, we want to make it so that if you connect, if you build an Orderful integration, it’s not, you know, 10,000 discussions internally about whether we can accept this contract. It’s a simple yes, we’re going to trade with Costco, we’re going to grow our revenue as a company. And then we’re actually going to start working on a relationship with you know, Wegmans, or you name the next big retailer because we don’t have to worry about how we’re going to integrate it.

Joe Lynch

And by the way, I love Costco. I went to Costco yesterday. And I don’t know if you pay attention, but Costco always has new stuff that they’re bringing in and they are trying to be more organic, more healthy, not to have all the bad stuff in the ingredients. And I noticed yesterday they have this mayonnaise, by Primal Kitchen, which is a smaller company, it’s not a Kraft, Heinz or Procter and Gamble. I’m sure they do well, because I know the brand, but they pride themselves on being organic and being cleaner. So I buy it, but I kept thinking, just what you described there. If you’re a small brand, and you want to work with a Costco or Best Buy or any of these big stores, it’s a big win to get in there. By the way, that means you’re adding more technology guys to your business, it means you’re probably going back to your investors and saying, give me more we’ve got we got a big tech army to feed.

Jonathan Kish

What you described, we would call Costco a leader. So we’ve been talking about when you’re the supplier trading with Costco, but you can also use Orderful’s platform when you’re a leader and actually make it really, really easy for your suppliers to self-service onboard on their own.

Joe Lynch

Exactly. Yeah, you make it easier to work with you.

Jonathan Kish

When these companies talk about supplier diversity, you know making sure we’re getting the best products on their shelves, you can really easily accomplish that with us.

Joe Lynch

You do not want to be limited by technology. You want to be able to say we bought this because this is the best product for our store. You think about some old brands that you don’t buy anymore, but they’ve been around forever and they’ve probably been using EDI for 30 years, but maybe they’re not the guys you want to work with anymore. Very interesting. So do you work with logistics companies?

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, our bread and butter is logistics, supply chain, and software platforms.

Joe Lynch

So describe how you might work with them.

Jonathan Kish

One of our proudest examples of success is with NFI. They’re the fourth largest 3PL in the United States. They were going through a digital transformation a few years ago and moving off of their legacy TMS to a new one. And they were researching new ways to do EDI. And they were doing it inhouse before. And when we talked about that inhouse flow, on average, it was taking them 10 weeks to onboard a new trading partner. With Orderful’s API, they’ve been able to reduce that to five days or less.

Joe Lynch

And those trading partners are typically shippers, right?

Jonathan Kish

It could be shippers, it could be merchants, it could be anyone, right, as you can imagine the flow from a 3PL. But, going from 10 weeks to five days, it’s an incredible change for their business.

Joe Lynch

Oh, yeah. You mentioned earlier the lag between, I sold it to the time I’m making money. That’s always been a concern, but now we’re measuring it because you sold it in the third quarter, but it doesn’t go live until the new year. That’s not going to help your paycheck. It’s not going to help the company make more money this year. And that’s a shame.

Jonathan Kish

Exactly.

Joe Lynch

Well, anyway, let’s switch gears for just a sec. How do you guys make money? How do you engage with the market?

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, so historically, I think that EDI pricing has been as difficult to understand as AWS pricing, right? You really need to know it. So for us, we make it really simple. We have two real charges in our product, one has a platform fee. So the actual access to Orderful and the other is a per trading partner fee. And it’s really, really clean. We don’t charge you based on the number of API calls you make or the number of transaction or document types you send, it’s just those two things, which is access to Orderful and the number of trading partners.

Joe Lynch

So this is software as a service.

Jonathan Kish

This is software as a service. We’ve solved the EDI problem, through software. This decades long pain that people have been feeling.

Joe Lynch

So do you work with software companies like transportation management systems or warehouse management systems or ERP systems?

Jonathan Kish

Yep. So that’s another piece of our business that actually I’m spearheading. It’s kind of becoming EDI infrastructure for other technology companies. So Emerge, Flock Freight, these TMSs have built their EDI solutions on our rails.

Joe Lynch

I’ve had those guys on my podcast. I’m hoping to have them both on soon again.

Jonathan Kish

Yep. And then similar for our smaller customers that we have, we recommend partners like Workato or Celigo, like your traditional iPaaS that make it easy for a small business to just start using Orderful within hours or days.

Joe Lynch

Now, you’ve lost me on that last piece there. What were you talking about with those?

Jonathan Kish

Oh, Workato and Celigo. They’re known as like iPaaS companies. So they basically make it easy for their customers to communicate with API. So they’ve built integrations to Orderful. So that’s not something that their customers have to do.

Joe Lynch

So they are connecting the connector. Well, you guys, you techies just make it very interesting for the rest of us. You just like us to look bewildered. That’s what it’s all about. But, what you’ve described to me really does simplify. And again, you know, we talked about the title, the modern approach to EDI, I think most of us who are not, day to day technical, it’s always this lurking suspicion in the back of our mind that we’re gonna stumble, when we get to the integration of this new customer. And we’re not wrong, it happens and you described it. And I love the idea that at some point, you could go to a company like an Emerge, or others and say they already have it. So if I go there, they’re already connected. So in a lot of ways, there’s customers who have their life made easy, because you’re already working with the software companies.

Jonathan Kish

Exactly. We have hundreds of thousands of customers that don’t even know they’re using Orderful on the back end. But it’s my belief that for the software providers, EDI is a merchant service that their customers expect them to have. And that’s when we add the most value in my opinion is when that company is building their EDI solution on our infrastructure.

Joe Lynch

Very nice. Very nice. So Jonathan, let’s wrap this bad boy up. So we talked about what is EDI and really it’s a system that’s not going away anytime soon. And the reason it’s not going away is we have these legacy users. And there tend to be very large users. And it does work. EDI does work. There’s a reason we stuck with it. Now we keep hearing about API. And there was a minute where I kept thinking, Oh, does API replace EDI? Not so much. Not anytime soon, because the big big companies are still using EDI. And they’re communicating with their partners that way. The problem with EDI and again, this my words not yours, is this connection between systems, adding a trading partner can take a lot of money and a lot of time, months, even a year, and a lot of cash to go with it. And meanwhile, you’re losing sales every step of the way. Every day that you don’t work with your customer, because you’re working in tech, you lose money. And so you guys came in, and you have this system. The whole goal is to allow trading partners to connect very quickly for a small price. I love it. So final thoughts.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, I think after that summary, expanding the BD team at Orderful I might like to bring you on. No, I think you summarized it well, right. You know, our North Star, are Twilio and Stripe, right? So we want you as a company to connect to Orderful once. And you have solved EDI moving forward. So maybe you need a business user to make a few changes here and there. But that initial integration, we believe should just be to our JSON schema. And from there you can start trading with whoever you want.

Joe Lynch

Yeah. You mentioned Twilio and Stripe. So I’m familiar with Stripe. And I’ve not used Twilio. But describe how you guys are like Stripe. First off describe what Stripe does, so people who don’t know, we’ll figure that out.

Jonathan Kish

Yeah, I won’t be as good of a salesperson for Stripe as I am for Orderful. But they’re a payment API. So if I’m an ecommerce company or a commerce company, and I want to send and receive payments, I integrate their API so that I can accept payment in the United States and Canada.

Joe Lynch

From all the credit cards and from all the banks.

Jonathan Kish

Exactly. So I don’t need to integrate to Visa to MasterCard

Joe Lynch

And a million banks.

Jonathan Kish

A million banks, right. They do that for me. They’ve kind of democratized the payment industry.

Joe Lynch

Which is great, because by the way, we wouldn’t have ecommerce if we didn’t have companies like that. And we have had older systems but, these guys made it real simple. Virtually any of us today could say I would like to receive payment by Stripe. And it’s pretty easy to just set up. Right?

Jonathan Kish

Exactly. And so again, how we want to be like them, as opposed to going back to the Best Buy Joe Lynch Incorporated example, as opposed to after you’ve built that integration, you only have that one, right? That one payload for that one integration partner. We want it so that when you build to Orderful, you can add Best Buy, Costco, WalMart, via the same connection. And so it’s a beautiful superset that you can build and maintain as opposed to needing all of this other stuff and time and resources and people don’t want to do this.

Joe Lynch

That’s absolutely fantastic. I love what you’re doing. And again, I look forward to the day where us non-techies can make a sale. And say, don’t worry about it. We’re connected, we connect to people like that, we’re using Orderful or somebody or software that uses Orderful. It’s been going on I think, my whole career. My whole career. I’ve heard about EDI connections. And you know, again, there’s nothing wrong with EDI. It’s just the fact that it doesn’t have a standard that makes it easy to add trading partners.

Jonathan Kish

Yep. And for us, like I always tell people and not to push this too hard. But reach out to me right, reach out to Erik, reach out to our team at Orderful. Let us show you the platform and let us go through the API with you. You know, there’s not a person who we’ve gone through that with that hasn’t immediately asked two questions. One is, is this real? And the second is why has no one done this before? Because I go back to the same thing I said, Orderful, myself being here only a few months, we’ve built the solution the market has been asking for for 20 years and can’t wait to continue to show people.

Joe Lynch

Yep, well to that end, what we’ll do is I’ll put a link to your LinkedIn profile. I’ll put a link to Orderful, which is Orderful.com and I’ll put a link to anything you and your marketing people give me. I’ll put in the show notes so people can reach out and talk to you. Before we hit record we were talking about conferences. And you said you’re going to Manifest, I will see you there. We’ve been friends for years, but we do not meet on the opposite sides of the country. Even though you came halfway to Michigan, you’re not all the way here. You’re just in Denver. But I will see you at Manifest. What other conferences do you guys attend?

Jonathan Kish

We’ll be at NRF, The Big Show in Manhattan in January as well. And then just throughout the year, when they make sense we’ll be popping up. We might not always have a booth, but you’ll probably see myself or the team walking the floor. So feel free to come up to us.

Joe Lynch

So will you have a booth at Manifest or are you just going to walk the floors?

Jonathan Kish

We’re actually going to be one of the sponsors there.

Joe Lynch

Oh, excellent. Excellent. Well, I look forward to seeing you and I look forward to seeing your booth at Manifest. And by the way, the Manifest is in January, and it’s in Vegas. And if you’re from upstate New York, where Jonathan used to live or in Michigan, it is cold in this area, Vegas, less cold. I know my friend Blythe said Vegas can be cold in January. I was like nah, she’s from Florida. For the rest of us, that’s a welcome vacation. And I talked to a lot of people about conferences, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about Manifest. Last year was the first year and people loved it.

Jonathan Kish

Yep, beyond excited to go and excited to meet you in person.

Joe Lynch

Yep. Well, Jonathan, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and congratulations joining Orderful. I don’t know how this can’t be successful. And thank all of you for being on my podcast. Your support is very much appreciated. Until next time, onward and upward.

Conclusion

You’ve been listening to the Logistics of Logistics podcast, where we engage in conversation with experts in the logistics field. For more details, visit thelogisticsoflogistics.com or follow Joe Lynch on LinkedIn.