by Burt Webb
In the late 80’s, I was asked to help speed up the shipping of merchandise for a mail order business by importing order information directly into their sales order system. After developing several similar custom solutions for other businesses, a client asked me to implement an EDI X12 (Electronic Data System) system.
EDI X12 is basically a format for transferring electronic business forms between companies. There are 315 different business forms in the EDI X12 standard and each form has many different fields, some required but many optional. Even though it is a “standard”, each company chooses its own subset of the possible components of an EDI form.
Over the years, I worked on EDI for a number of corporate clients doing business with numerous other businesses. Separate discussions and exchanges were required for each of their business partner in order to set up a particular EDI relationship. A great deal of time was spent just trying to find the correct person to answer a question. Weeks could be occupied playing phone tag.
There are always challenges with setting up the communication channel and protocols for the exchange of EDI transactions and interfacing the EDI messages with the order entry and fulfillment systems on both ends. I had to write several EDI translators because of the shortcomings of commercial EDI packages.
I will be sharing general EDI information and personal stories from my own work in future blog entries. Please join in with your own stories about EDI implementations.
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