Leah, your analysis and points below are impressive!!!! You’ve just written a great roadmap for folks to use. Kudos!!!!
Rachel Foerster 847-872-8070 From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Leah Halpin Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2012 8:37 AM To: Earl Wertheimer; gisnewbie; [email protected] Subject: Re: [EDI-L] EDI translation for a small firm already going through a van Hi ?, I will not disagree with my esteemed colleague, however, depending on your needs and choices you may save more or less of that leg. The first thing you need to do is identify what you do need, the resources you currently have and the budget you have for new resources should you determine based on your need, to support in house what the VAN is currently doing. Point 1 - you want to save money - always a good incentive for management Point 2 - you say "flat file" but you identify yourself (vaguely) as a newbie, it is important to choosing the proper solution that you understand what types of files your "trading partners" (what we in the biz call companies who send and receive EDI between each other), which can be customers, vendors, suppliers, etc. By type, I mean are they sending proprietary data, in that each partner is sending you an entirely different format, or, more likely, are your partners using some EDI standard such as X12 (North American, typically) or EDIFACT (Europe, some NA, other regions)? Point 3 - If your TP's are, in fact, sending you data files that are in a "standard" format, then almost any commercial "translator" will work for you, so, yay, however, that's where the fun starts, not where it ends. Point 4 - this is where you figure out what sort of volume you have, what technical expertise, if any, you have in house, how much time you have to do set up, what sort of learning curve the software (particularly mapping tool and support/system monitor) has, what maintenance will cost, who's going to monitor on a day to day basis, what you need to know to do that, how often you'll need "new" maps, and on, and on, and on. Point 5 - once you've got point 4 done, then you need to send out some RFQ's or contact sales people. At the moment, you've put the cart ahead of the horse and if you're not careful, you're going to end up spending a lot of money only to throw up your hands and go back to paying the VAN. Point 6 - if you really are a newbie, hiring a consultant (and there are several great ones on this list) to help you analyze your business requirements, system requirements and ongoing support needs will save you a ton of money and frustration on the back end. I'm not one of them, so please understand this is actually good advice, not self serving. Remember this, if you remember nothing else, salespeople will promise you the moon, but they often don't mention it might take "a while" or cost extra for "customizing". Good Luck, Leah ________________________________ From: Earl Wertheimer <[email protected] <mailto:earlw%40spe-edi.com> > To: gisnewbie <[email protected] <mailto:madhaviperugu%40yahoo.com> >; [email protected] <mailto:EDI-L%40yahoogroups.com> Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2012 10:35 PM Subject: Re: [EDI-L] EDI translation for a small firm already going through a van > We currently go through a VAN that charges us an arm and a leg for > each map since the data needs to come to us as xml while our partners > are only able to send flat files. If you bring the flat file (I suspect X12?) to XML conversion inhouse, you will save an arm, but not the leg. > Is there any tool out there that we can use just for the translation > so we can skip on the 100,000 dollars we might end up having to pay > the van for translating out messages for us.... There are lots of tools, Open Source and others that will do this, or you can pay someone to write the conversion once. http://www.jitterbit.com/ has a community edition on sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/jitterbit/ Earl Wertheimer [email protected] <mailto:earlw%40spe-edi.com> http://www.spe-edi.com [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! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
