Oh come on.... a company thinking EDI is easy and anyone can handle it, so yes they move the existing person on to other things or let staff go without impact to the company?? Gee that never happens... LOL
You'll have to ask me how long it took to get two mainframe programmers to even get a clue about EDI at a major Fortune 500 company I was with previously because they had a 3 man EDI team, two of them were contractors and the company decided to let all the contractors go company wide and then decided these two mainframe programmers could 'easily' handle it. Or the VP of technology at a smaller company who tried for 3 months to manage EDI on his own... or... or... or.... And how many times have we all had Trading partners that were a 'one man' EDI shop and when that one person went on vacation, there was no one in any other area of the company who could answer or fix the production issues with either inbound EDI or tell us why we keep getting 997's in error for out bound EDI... I almost always request to have more than one EDI contact, review my TP contacts at least anually if not semi annually and if I know it's a small shop on the other end, make sure there's someone there who can assist when the primary person is out or worse. Ken ________________________________ From: Leah Halpin <[email protected]> To: Brian Lehrhoff <[email protected]>; [email protected] Sent: Mon, March 28, 2011 9:22:30 AM Subject: Re: [EDI-L] What should I do with our vast EDI system? One good reason to "fix" something that isn't "broken" is the one proposed by the original poster. Although I may be reading too much into his post, it seems that he is moving on and there will be no one to understand the system. Homegrown solutions have a tendency to get messy and convoluted and are almost always poorly documented, if at all. Also, there tends to be a lot of hard coding and exceptions, added as necessary. With a standardized, supported solution in place, people can come and go without holding the business hostage, so to speak. My favorite example of this is an administrative professional who was "right sized" out of her job (with two weeks severance for her 10+ years of service) when her company was bought by another. Turns out, she was the ONLY person who knew how to do the payroll. Oops. The purchasing company hadn't thought to ask her or check out/update/merge the purchased company's payroll system. She was asked very nicely to come back as a consultant, demanded and got five times her previous salary for three months while they got everyone moved over to the new system. What if she'd stood on principal? Or heaven forbid, had died? Can you see management handing out cash to professionals? Leah ________________________________ From: Brian Lehrhoff <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, March 28, 2011 8:27:34 AM Subject: Re: [EDI-L] What should I do with our vast EDI system? If it's not broken, why are you trying to fix it? Any commercial software will take you 6 months to learn and implement, and will cost 100% of the acquisition cost for implementation. Is this a cost that your company wants to take on? Brian Lehrhoff, EA ([email protected]) Messaging Consultant 201-913-4506 Upgrade your Quickbooks for 20% off at http://ea.brianlehrhoff.com Circular 230 Notice is located at http://ea.brianlehrhoff.com/230notice.html ________________________________ From: karnaf62 <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sun, March 27, 2011 6:43:30 PM Subject: [EDI-L] What should I do with our vast EDI system? 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? ------------------------------------ ... Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Job postings are welcome, but for job postings or requests for work: <JOBS> IS REQUIRED in the subject line as a prefix.Yahoo! Groups Links [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ... Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Job postings are welcome, but for job postings or requests for work: <JOBS> IS REQUIRED in the subject line as a prefix.Yahoo! 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