6/21/01
As anyone who has been around ANSI EDI setups knows, there is a significant time
and money investment required to put together a really good system with full
integration into an applications system.
The last couple of days I was working at one of my clients, a major manufacturer
in Wisconsin. This customer is reasonably new to ANSI EDI, only doing recently
doing any of their own work on it. (For about a year, they had been accepting
ANSI orders from only one customer, using a Mercator application built by an
outside firm).
Over the last couple of months they had invested a lot of time and money to get
ANSI X.12 running with a number of other customers who had requested it over the
past couple of years, but still no one had seen any tangible benefits; it seemed
EDI support was a "cost of sales" rather than an "aid to order processing."
The sales department of this firm was successful in landing a new account; but,
they had to commit to being able to accept ANSI X.12 orders and provide ANSI
X.12 invoices. The IT department dutifully (though not without some grousing,
but you expect that) set up the translation and mapping and integration, went
through the testing, and on Monday the new customer sent in his first batch of
orders: 324 PO's with 66,215 line items.
The orders were picked up from the VAN at 3:00 AM. By 4:00 AM, all orders were
entered into the user's sales order system.
The next morning, the IT people did a little math: they figured it would have
taken three (3) man-weeks to hand-key all those orders. The IT people were
amazed; and they usually don't get all that excited about productivity
improvements in "the other building" (the sales/service departments).
The next day, the customer sent in another 36 PO's with 8000+ line items. More
savings.
As someone who has been a long time "true believer" in the productivity
improvements available using EDI, I just love it when a "real user" can finally
and clearly see his investment pay off, so I thought I'd share.
Michael C. Mattias
Tal Systems
Racine WI
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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