Well, I think your last next to last line says it all! Fast and reliable
response! In my experience, the only way to get that is to keep it in house
and the fact that you recognize the criticality of EDI to your business would
also point to that. You will have to spend some money to update your
translator, but there are many good ones. I'm very familiar with Gentran for
UNIX and Windows and prefer the UNIX for the functionality it brings. I saw
something about it being available on LINUX but have not checked that out
myself. There are also other good options for translators that maybe less
expensive, such as SoftShare - or whatever it is now. I've contracted at
companies where it was outsourced and at companies where we did it in house and
the ability to respond swiftly and accurately was at least 3 to 5 times better
at in house facilities as opposed to outsourced. At the companies who
outsourced, I was mainly a project manager facilitating between the ERP
developers (overseas, so a time differential) and the EDI developers. It
sometimes would take weeks to get changes made, and months to implement a new
customer or supplier! Very frustrating. There is one other option I've never
explored, but Boomi Software offers a "Cloud" service where I believe you still
do all the work, but the translator is hosted on their systems. When I worked
with the product initially, it was installed on a local machine and I thought
it was great. Approaching the idea of Sterling Integrator, but much easier and
less resource intensive. I was disappointed to hear they did away with the
freestanding product, but still considered it a good product. The bottom line
in my opinion is that you would lose control of a very important piece of your
business ifyou outsourced it as you would be bound by other's work loads and
priorities which you would have no control over.
Good Luck!
Dave Records
On Mar 27, 2011, at 6:43 PM, karnaf62 wrote:
> We have an in-house EDI server, EDI software, 100s of trading partners, 15
> different EDI transactions, X12 and XML, various custom-files exchanged using
> EDI between several in-house systems and much more.
>
> Since we are a "Vendor" and our Trading Partners are "The Customer",
> according to EDI de-facto rules, we have a custom map for each TP/Transaction.
>
> This vast system is a product of my hard work for over 15 years at my company
> .
>
> Everything is working very well, self supported, no issues.
>
> But(!), nothing will stay the same for ever... including myself (I moving to
> a new role in the company) and our aging EDI system that will have to be
> replaced by new software (i.e. throw away all the current maps and setups and
> write them from scratch).
>
> We are not opposed to outsourcing, especially with EDI which, in general,
> requires a one-time setup for each interchange and not much of maintenance
> after that.
>
> But, because we are so dependent on EDI with our customers (EDI brings more
> than 90% of our sales) we want costs to be down, and fast response to changes
> and new setups.
>
> What would you recommend?
>
>
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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