Re: EDI at midrange sites - Off Topic??

On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Ed Chabot wrote:

> I hope that this isn't too far off topic.  I was curious about how other
> AS/400 sites are conducting EDI.  Specifically, on a PC or AS/400, what
> packages are being used, how many trading partners are involved, interfaced
> to AS/400 systems or print and re-key, etc.
>

This is completely on-topic, isn't it?

We used to do EDI with a PC program.  We'd create files on the AS/400
containing the data we wanted to send, and download them to a PC, and
have the PC transform the file into EDI format and send it.  For incoming
files we'd reverse the process... the EDI software would write it to a
PC file, and we'd upload that and a program would run that would insert
the data into our applications.

The problem with this method is that it was very error prone, and required
quite a bit of manual work.  (With todays networking tools it could be
made somewhat less painful, however this was back in 1994)

Currently, we instead use Trustedlink EDI/400 by Peregrine (originally it
was Premenos, then it was bought by Harbinger, and then bought again by
Peregrine) which runs on the 400 itself.

We have things integrated into the EDI software to the point where no user
intervention is required at all, except when adding new trading partners.

When this software was owned by Premenos, it was a rock-solid product with
wonderful tech support.   Peregrine's tech support isn't as good, and
their software is a lot more buggy...  but it'd be a lot of work for us to
change it at this point, so we're sticking with it.

We have about 50 trading partners.  Nothing is print & re-key (since,
IMHO, that would completely defeat the point of using EDI)