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Creating an Electronic Data Interchange System?

Posted by Cliff on from the electronic-dialog-implementation dept.

jgrumbles asks: "I've been in a PC support technician internship for the past 7 months for a polyethylene (plastic) pipe company which has doubled in size the past 4 years. I've been notified that management wants me to head a new initiative within the company. The main goal, in the beginning, is to basically restructure the slipshod EDI system they are using right now. The IT director even admits he should have had some training when implementing the system, but it was at the time of the boom so he had to do it as he went along. Are there any definitive EDI/E-Commerce information conglomerates, websites, listservs, groups, or other sources of information? My main mission will be to recreate the EDI system, which includes an AS/400 in a Windows environment, from scratch. Further down the road I'll be in charge of implementing technology in other areas such as getting RFIDs on every piece of pipe we ship in order to further automate tracking and billing. So, does anyone have suggestions on where to look for information and possible case studies?"

1 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Links by isj · · Score: 3, Informative

    Knowing what to search for brings up these relevant links:
    EDIFACT
    X12
    How Radio Frequency Identification Affects EDI
    Integration for Logistics: RFID, EDI, XML, and Beyond

    If you are using an off-the-shelf inventory/billing system they you should probably consider letting someone else handle the integration and format-translation.

    I have implemented an EDI system from scratch at my previous company. It was based on EDIFACT and email, and had extensive tracking&tracing, status feedback, error handling. The major challenge in implementing and EDI system is the integration with your EDI partners. It took 3 months from start of testing to the first real EDI message getting through, and almost a year before the workflow was right. Another challenge is that touches on legal responsibility - who said what, why, when.

    I believe that ROI was good. No more manually entering 5 batches of 100 items every day. And the deadlines were improved so the final information set could be imported half an hour before work was initiated.

    As far as I know the system is still chugging along 5 years after I left the company.