Slashdot Mirror
Creating an Electronic Data Interchange System?
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?"
Boss: jgrumbles, our company is growing fast; we've doubled in size over the past 48 months. We need you to design, build and implement an EDI to replace our AS/400 system. Plan for expansion into RFID, shipping and automated tracking & billing. Would you mind using Ask Slashdot for guidance in this risky, company-wide endeavour?
Trolling is a art,
Why do most people insist on recreating the wheel. I cannot imagine that your company needs some specialized version of EDI that no other company uses since that is the point of EDI (to make everything equal).
Tell your boss that buying standard software is usually cheaper than programming and supporting custom software to do the same job. Are you going to be writing the companies word processing software next. If so, quit now!
Try here
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Ok, this REALLY should have been one for google- even I admit that and I'm usually on the other side. Just how many hackers on slashdot do you think have even messed with EDI?
There are a few of us. Actually probably quite a lot of us.
Still, given IBM's movement to bladeservers,
Obviously you haven't, EDI is not about hardware. You should have googled too....
http://www.x12.org/ would be a good place to start.
Simply put, EDI is a set off transactions for communicating B2B. (Business to Business) Electronic orders, invoices, advanced ship notices (ASN), electronic Bills of Lading. They are flat text files with tokens (slashdotters will love that, it sounds like a config file).
Then of course there is XML EDI.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
The AS/400 is hardly old, although its possible his machine is. It's still being upgraded and improved, and one AS/400 (iSeries or i5 these days) can do the job of a rack full of blade servers. And while its doing that its far more reliable and was built from the ground up to handle databases. It NEVER crashes unless something is physically broken, and even that is rare since it usually detects hardware problems before they become critical. It handles our EDI just fine, although if you go with the industry standard Harbinger/Peregrin/whatever-they-call-themselves-t hese-days EDI software, it will be expensive due to the tiered pricing scheme.
e nds/index_flat.html .
For a good read on IBM iSeries, check out http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/leg
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A Slashdot "Hacker" who not only "messes" with EDI and the AS/400, but PLCs, industrial automation and RFID tags as well...
1. I recommend GNU/Life. The current stable version is lacking some critical features so definitely go with the latest unstable version from CVS. I'd stay away from OpenLifeSupport and its KDE and Gnome counterparts. They seem to still be in their infancy.
2. No, I don't think so. You might want to perform your surgery at the local LUG's next install fest. That way you can get lots of support.
In Republican America phones tap you.
No, seriously. That's a sure sign that your employer is, in a word, without sense or direction. Sure, there's opportunity in chaos, but my 15 years in IT haven't prepared me to take on a challenge like that.
We do EDI. We do it big. It's complex. It's a pain. Hire consultants. They'll waste your money, but it's not the sort of place into which one hops with no experience. Heck, hire a vendor like (Covast|Mercator|Gentran|Amtrix) to do it end-to-end. You'd be much better off career-wise learning to track and manage a project like that rather than to do it yourself.
(We're not consultants, by the way. We're a distribution company.)
Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics.
The point is- both of which can be done better WITHOUT an AS/400 in the mix. It's drop dead simple to go from SQL to whatever flat text file format you want- and XML is still a flat text file format.
Riiiight. This really cements my opinion that you DKWTFYTA. If they're using an AS/400 for their EDI now it probably means that it's also doing their ERP, invoicing, and other accounting. Doing away with their AS/400 would most likely mean even wider changes in their organization than just changing edi platforms. You can never simply "dump your as400." Were you even aware you can work with your DB2 UDB on your MIDRANGE (NOT A FUCKING MAINFRAME) iSeries with vanilla SQL?
Besides, you can create all the x12 text files you want, but if you're dealing with a lot of customers or vendors you're probably going to need to go through a VAN in which case you'll want their EDI suite anyway.
And going back to your original post, have you ever even worked on an iSeries (as400)? Long after all your blade servers have died strange and varied deaths, that iSeries will be chugging in the back room. I don't think you'll ever find a system as stable and well documented as the iSeries.
When it comes to business continuity you can't put a price tag on it. I'd MUCH rather pay a shit load of money for an iSeries that will run without complaint for decades with little intervention, than a slightly lesser shit load of money for a raft of pc blade servers.
No, the point is that it's not a hardware issue. It can be done on AS/400, it can be done on VMS, it can be done on windows, and I would assume that it can be done on Linux.
It's like someone asking you how to do a mail merge, and you telling them to rip out MSOffice and Windows and install Linux and OpenOffice.
And no, it's not 'drop dead simple' to go from SQL to x12 EDI. Because there are going to be a lot of business rules in there. Most EDI is legacy, and companies are not using XML yet.
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. -- Harry Truman
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.
Ok, in this discussion I've learned that what I thought was an old mainframe is really a minicomputer. And that grid computing isn't as useful as I thought it was for getting rid of an IT department. And yes, I used to consider ANY opportunity to rip out legacy hardware and software and replace it with something more maintainable a good thing, thank you for correcting me.
But tell me, why are other programmers so scared of a well defined set of business rules, no matter how large it is? A data transform is a data transform, and while it may take you some TIME to code a data transform, and testing to get it correct, it's a heck of a lot simpler than say, coming up with a new algorithym to break the latest DRM attempt from the RIAA. At least you HAVE business rules. Anything that has business rules to transform one set of data to another is easy money, as far as I'm concerned.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Seriously though, you need to get someone that has massive experience doing this sort of thing and doing it in anger.
Lasers Controlled Games!
You're a techie, but this is no reason to start off with a solely tech discussion. As a former techie, and more recently a consultant, here's my spin:
(1) get your boss to write down the business reasons for the change. Not technical reasons, business - cost savings, productivity increases, etc.
If there aren't well defined reasons, then you can't technically come up with a solution that's much use, as they haven't defined the problem for you.
(2) Get your boss to write down the goal of the project. This is usually a single statement. Eg if you worked in an oil company the goal might be "deploy a pipeline from turkey to russia that can carry 5m L oil per day". If he won't write it down, you write it, and get him to approve it formally.
If he can't or won't, then you don't have a baseline to judge all future decisions against. I.e. whwnever you have a question or problem, ask yourself does it help or hinder this goal.
(3) Figure out what the parameters of the deployment should be: think what, when, why, how, where. E.g. it should be completed within X months, should not cost more than $Y, should be availble in Z% of offices, should not take more time to complete a transaction than the exisiting system.
These parameters help define what you should and shouldn't do, how much resource to devote etc. Basically they give you the rules of the game.
(4) Figure out who the stakeholders are - ie who is affected, and who has power within the company. This typically includes the fincial director at a high level, and end-suers at the low level. Speak to the FD - he often has final say over everything, and has his own set of expectations different to the IT director. Speak to the users - they can suggest problems that need to be fixed, and things that work and they want kept.
Knowing the stakeholders and keeping them informed and happy is the biggest challenge.
No offense, but you say you're a 7m technician intern. This makes me suspicious they putting a core business function in your hands that if fucked up could kill the company.
I suggest after doing basic research, going back to the IT director and saying something along the lines of "the total cost of switching, impacts on the business and risk to business interruption are not clear. Yes the current solution might look expensive on paper, but it might be less expensive than swapping. We need to scope this in a bit more depth, and possibly engage outside experts for a small study to understand costs, benefits and impacts." then hand him a short list of potential expert companies that can help. by this stage you'll have called these companies, and in general terms described your problem, and checked out if than can help, how and will it cost. You'll have names, phone numbers and email addresses for all of them.
I agree with the others when they say EDI isn't something to take on alone. Use the experts. If you've never project managed before on any scale, I suggest you get help with that too - internally or externally.
Best of luck. this can be a great learning experience.
Ps if your company throws a wobbly at any of the things I've suggested above, tehn that means they're not serious. Find yourself another job, they don't pay you enough to deal with bad management on top of everything.