Last month I was involved in two very different conference calls with clients and their trading partners that highlights a successful and unsuccessful approach to implementing truly integrated EDI.
It struck me that one of the major issues the unsuccessful approach had was that they had totally underestimated the impact integrated EDI would have on their trading partners business processes and systems. Remember, EDI involves at least two parties, if both parties cannot process the data automatically then what you have is a fax.
In this case the party sending the purchase order had not realised how much manual effort the recipient put in to processing their orders because the data was inconsistent. For example, the delivery point required was never codified and so the same delivery address could appear on an order (Paper based) in several different formats, sometime complete, sometimes not. In the end a human being can "infer" the meaning and in this case 95% of the time they got it right. However, the sender of the data had decided to use an XML format for the message which did not impose any data requirements upon the sender. Needless to say they did not see need to change the data from that being sent on the Paper PO. The result was that as soon as the PO hit the recipients system it failed to process because the computer system did not know where to deliver the goods. The orders could still be processed but all would require manual intervention. We then had to have a one hour conference call to explain to the technical people at the senders software house why this data was essential.
The second conference call was totally different. The two parties exchanging information discussed minimum requirements for their individual systems, these were specified, added to business rules at the hub, just to be on the safe side, and test data exchanged. Some further rounds of testing took place in the week that followed, testing various scenarios, but all passed because of the upfront cooperation.
The result is that, despite the second instance above starting one week after the first, the second instance have now moved to LIVE message exchange. The first instance are still ironing out the wrinkles, but may go live next week.
I am not saying that every implementation of EDI needs the upfront level of detail shown in the second example but it must be worth your time to do this with your biggest trading partners. You will get a bigger and faster ROI if you do.
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