EDI Integration Services

Business BluePrint

If you are new to EDI, or have a new business process you need to implement, we usually start with a business BluePrint.
This consists of 6 parts:

Interviews with Key internal management or resources to understand the scope of the requirements
Review of Guidelines or specs from trading partner requesting an EDI implementation.
Discussion as whether you wish to outsource your mapping or purchase and control the mapping and data processing in-house.
Send a questionnaire to your trading partners to better understand which transactions they are targeting, what standard (EDI X12, or UN/EDIFACT, RosettaNet, OAGi, OASIS, or any number of XML standards), their version, and their current capability. We have a template already created that is simple, but complete.
Internal review of recommended processes for your architecture, and any customization work.
Evaluation of resources for support of all phases of the testing, custom programming (if necessary), and configuration of your ERP system.

During this phase, we drill down to the specific business models you wish to implement. For example for inbound orders you may wish to implement standard, drop shipments and service orders, but not implement sample orders. Each of the three business models will require specific information. This is defined during this process.

The test environment for your ERP system is defined, and the processes tested. At this point, the metadata defined in the Business Specification Process is mapped to the preprocessing files as specified by your ERP system.
Your translator is mapped to the technical specification.

Unit testing for each business model is performed.
Your beta test partner sends a transaction to confirm the communication process is working.
All your business scenarios are testing with your partner.
User acceptance is performed, and presuming all is well, moved into production.

We recommend guideline creation as part of your EDI/ecommerce implementation.
We believe in guideline creation to “fast track” your implementations, save costs, empower internal resources as they can send guidelines to customer and other trading partners. It also documents your EDI processes for your internal resources and SOX requirements. However, the guidelines are only effective when well designed and the various business scenarios are addressed and defined with examples. We prefer the product from GEFEG (http://www.gefeg.com/en/index.htm), but have worked with the leading Guideline products. Softshare’s Delta has a guideline creation feature in it, so additional software purchase for guideline creation is not required. For more information on guidlelines. Press here.

If you wish to consider outsourcing your mapping and implementations to a firm specializing in ecommere, we have supported and interviewed a number of firms looked to outsource. We understand some of the hidden costs and can help guide you to a successful program with your provider.
We have written RFQ, and can help you structure your RFQ so that nearly all of the technical and procedural questions can be addressed before the contract is signed.

We are experts at EDI Mapping and have worked with major translators such as Gentran^®, TLE^® (Inovis & Harbinger), Premenos in UNIX, Mainframe (TSO) and Windows environments.
We have proven processes for documenting the mapping processes, making future modification to the maps easier to do and for all to understand.