Re: An Innovis question on AS/400 -Thanks

Thanks to all who answered my question. You have been very helpful. 
Rob

Scott Klement <klemscot@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We're an Inovis customer. Though, we were originally a Premenos customer
and have followed the software from Premenos to Harbinger to Peregrine and
finally Inovis.

> It says on their web site:'Easily integrate the mapper into your
> internal applications without programming. '

What it actually allows you to do is map data from a file into an EDI
document, along with some limited ability to do calculations on the field
data, and also map back from the EDI data into your files.

So... if the fields in your files happen to be adequate for creating or
receiving EDI documents, you can do it without programming.

Ours weren't.

A simple example of this... our customers expect a "delivery date" to be
sent to them via EDI. Our files contain a "ship date", because of
course, we want to know when the truck needs to be loaded by. So, a
program needs to be run which is smart enough to figure out a delivery
date based on a ship date. Since this varies depending on the route the
truck takes, it's too complex to do without programming.

So, to accomodate everyone's needs, we run a program that generates input
data to the EDI system in a temporary file, then run Inovis' program that
imports it into the EDI system. Likewise, when data is received, we
have Inovis software that writes it to a temp file, and then we read that
in an RPG program and convert it (using our own logic, which is sometimes
complex) into our own file formats.

Thanks to the APIs and CL commands that Inovis provides, our EDI system is
entirely automatic. No user intervention is necessary. We simply have a
program that runs in the OS/400 job scheduler that kicks off every 2
hours, and it pulls the data from our files, runs the Inovis software,
verifies that everything was successful, reads in the newly received data,
imports it into our systems, etc. It saves us needing a person to run
the program, which results in saving money.

Our old EDI software (a now defunct product that we got from Sterling
Software called GENTRAN: Basic) was a lot less automatic. We couldn't
really check for errors in the process, and had to have a person check
them. We couldn't make things very integrated. Plus, the input and
output files were different for every version of every EDI transaction
set, so we had to do a lot more programming. The Inovis software saves
us a lot of money because it's interfacing with programs is so much
better.

I've never used Extol, and so I can't compare them.

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