Grizzly Malchow wrote:
I'm looking into ways I can implement EDI at our company. This is my first foray into EDI and I'm pretty much in the dark about what my options are.
To be honest, I find the technical stuff to be the easy part. Whether
to use a VAN or not is probably your trading partner's decision. The
document standards will be your trading partner's decision. The
communication protocol: same thing. All that's left for you to decide
is whether you need translation software (some ERP packages provide EDI
translation.)
When I did EDI, we had a home grown order entry system, home grown
purchase order system, home grown receiving system, inventory, etc. It
was pretty easy to use Premenos to read our order entry files and create
a PO 850 and drop them off to the VAN.
The difficult part was automating things the other way - when we get an
order from a customer, we typed it in on a 5251 panel. There wasn't an
'import order' or any web service or any API we had that would accept an
order from an outside source.
In order to implement EDI successfully, we had to write what amounted to
import and export APIs for many of our internal systems. APIs that
could automatically handle bringing a new order into the system and
generating an EDI document reporting back what items were in stock, etc.
That, to me, was the hard part of EDI.
--buck
midrange.com
