YARDLEY, PA. —For many EDI-savvy distributors, exchanging information with customers and suppliers who do not belong to Value Added Networks means they must revert to sending faxes and making phone calls.

Functionality is incorporated into Trading Partner Connect version 9.0, the latest version of Prophet 21's Internet trading network, and helps distributors communicate more easily with customers and suppliers without the same capabilities. Version 9.0 allows distributors to send and receive electronic business documents using the File Transfer Protocol, a way to communicate with out-of-network business partners, eliminating the hassles of working through traditional EDI VANS.

"That translates into a lot of manual processes when we communicate with 25 percent of our customer and vendor base who can't handle EDI," says Brad Madore, IT manager at Duncan Equipment Co., an industrial and MRO supplies distributor with offices in Oklahoma and Texas, who uses the product.