More than five years after they first began talking about Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Canadian media buyers and sellers can finally expect to become part of the electronic age later this year.
Brian Pearman, president of Toronto-based Electronic Space & Time and the man that’s shepherding the move toward EDI on behalf of a number of agencies and media suppliers, says all the difficult and time-consuming work has now been done, so once the project gets final industry approval, the system could be up and running as early as this summer.
Since leaving Genesis Media two years ago, Pearman has spent much of his time advocating industry standards for the electronic transmission of business documents that are needed to buy television, radio, newspaper, magazine and outdoor advertising. Eliminating much of the paperwork that buyers and sellers are now required to do, many in the media management industry believe, will result in huge cost savings.
The delivery of contracts, insertion orders and invoices will be handled through an Internet-based software system operated by a yet-to-be-determined third-party service bureau.
‘I’m telling everyone if they make a commitment, we could get all the documents flowing back and forth by the end of this year,’ says Pearman.
He says the EDI concept is easier to sell today than it was five years ago because everyone has had a chance to become more comfortable with electronic transactions of all kinds.
Sunni Boot, president of Optimedia Canada, is a strong supporter of the EDI project and believes it’s a necessity for the industry. With traditional paper-based systems, she says, discrepancies in the scheduling of television commercials could take up to 45 days to be discovered by the time a confirmation makes it back to the agency from the broadcaster. Such discrepancies, she adds, have invoicing implications for clients.
‘Our business is based on thousands of transactions in any given week or month and we’re the last industry left that isn’t electronically transferring this data,’ Boot says. ‘The data we get is subject to input errors – human errors – that I won’t say will be eliminated, but that will be vastly reduced by EDI.’
To date, the electronic transfer of information has primarily been restricted to invoices being distributed by such companies as Donovan Data Systems Canada (formerly Harris Donovan Systems Limited).
Wally Oakes, president of DDS Canada, says discrepancies in the paper-based system are causing a lot of media people, on both the buying and selling sides, to ignore the information they’re receiving.
‘I think people are drowning in paper.’
