Most businesses are not limited by the quality of their people or the strength of their products. In many cases, the larger constraint sits deeper inside the organisation, in the way data moves between systems, departments and trading partners.
Every time data passes from one platform to another, there is a point where accuracy, structure and compatibility matter. If something is missing, misaligned or incorrectly configured, the process can break. A person then has to investigate, correct the issue and move the transaction forward manually. That intervention may appear small in isolation, but across thousands or millions of transactions it can become a material source of cost, delay and operational risk.
Invoice processing provides a clear example. Manually processing a single invoice can cost between £10 and £15. When clean, structured data flows through an automated process, that cost can fall below £2. For a business processing 10,000 invoices a year, the difference represents more than £100,000 that may be sitting in the gap between manual handling and effective automation.
That gap is important because it shows how data quality can influence margins, scalability and resilience. Businesses often invest heavily in systems, but the return on that investment depends on whether information can move through those systems without friction. Poor data does not just slow a process down. It can also increase support requirements, create avoidable exceptions and reduce confidence in the reliability of key operating workflows.
itim group’s EDI Plus platform demonstrates how this issue can be addressed at scale. In 2025, EDI Plus processed 9.5 million transactions, of which 6.9 million were invoices. Across that volume, only 0.11% required manual intervention from the support team. That low level of intervention is relevant because even a small improvement in exception rates can have a meaningful impact when transaction volumes are high.
In every case, the issue came from a trading partner configuration error, rather than from the client’s own process. EDI Plus identified the issue before it reached the client, preventing external data problems from becoming internal disruption. This highlights a key part of effective data infrastructure: the ability not only to move information quickly, but also to detect and contain errors before they create wider operational consequences.
itim Group plc (LON:ITIM) is a SaaS-based technology company that enables store-based retailers to optimise their businesses to improve financial performance and effectively compete with online competitors. Itim adds retail value by helping multi-channel retailers optimise their business and their stores to improve financial performance and compete more effectively with the “Amazons”.
