Re: EDI at midrange sites - Off Topic??

I suspect EDI popularity varies by industry.

We used to do EDI but we abandoned it because our customers let their
personnel violate standards & this meant that fulfilling idiotic demands by
customer personnel who did not understand the principles of EDI, as requested
by our company personnel who did not understand them either, just wiped out
all the time we had to spend working on anything else, until management
realized they no longer could justify this expense.  Until the plug was
pulled on our EDI I package, I was constantly complaining that we needed to
invest in EDI II.

Basically we were doing modified EDI I.
I massaged the data to make it easier to transcribe, and I was constantly
working on trying to reinvent the EDI II wheel & being shot in the back by
EDI users who had been given absolutely no training in how to use EDI
productively.

We had 3 customers doing EDI & each of them had several divisions & each
division had several people playing with the rules & they were all playing
different games.

For example ... they really need to start using a particular kind of
transaction set, but instead they decide to change what various fields are
used for in a set that is inappropriate to the task, while still sending us
the correct set, and how do we tell the difference what they are using some
set for?  Well some value in some field that they are sloppy about doing
according to their own rules, so we end up having to do some reasonableness
checking on other fields to figure out which set of rules apply to this EDI
transmission.

For example ... they want to order stuff changing the rules of their own
company but they cannot get their own company computer department to
implement it, so their buyer tells our customer service what has to be
changed & our management goes along with this, so the EDI data has to be
massaged when it comes in to actually order something different than the
official records of the customer, and we have to keep track of who authorized
this because the customer's accounting department might not pay the bills.

For example ... in addition to all the games with the data, they had buyers
call in & say they want the following changes made to their order, that we
have not yet got from EDI.

> From: echabot@marlinfirearms.com (Ed Chabot)

>  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.

MacWheel99@aol.com (Alister Wm Macintyre) (Al Mac)
BPCS 405 CD Manager / Programmer @ Global Wire Technologies Incorporated
http://www.globalwiretechnologies.com = new name same quality wire
engineering company: fax # 812-424-6838