Michael Mattias wrote:
> 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 enthusiasm for a single success is nice to see. But a note of
caution needs to be added.
One of the problems of trad-EDI is that it does not scale very well.
While there are few trading partners it can be forced to work, but as
the number of inter-trading partners increase, it becomes more and more
difficult to the point of becoming impractical. Don't expect switching
to XML sytax to help, either. That just adds more complexity and a new
set of problems on top of the trad-edi problems.
If it takes a week to implement a new trading partner using trad-EDI and
there are 500 trading partners, it will take 10 years to cover the
partner base. In practice, as more trading partners start to intertrade,
each implementation will take longer and cost more as the amount of
customisation required to implement each trading partner starts to
conflict with customisation added to enable trading partners implemented
earlier. The chaos caused by additive error rates will also take their
toll.
Some of the points NOT mentioned in that eulogy should also be noted:
* What was the error rate?
* How long did they take to fix?
* How much disorganisation and chaos was caused by full order rejection
and part order rejection to both organisations in those tens of
thousands of lines per day?
* How much did it cost to customise both business systems and operating
procedures to incorporate the new trading relationship?
etc etc
There apears to be more people dropping trad-edi and switching to
adaptor technology and "business exchanges" than are adopting it these
days, for good reason.
So let's not get too carried away.
--
Ken Steel ICARIS Services
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Technology: http://www.icaris.net/
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