EDI: Mature Technology. Why Is It Still Hard & Expensive?

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). 

It’s been around since the 70’s, matured through the 80’s with standard bodies developed for X12, EDIFACT, etc, was declared “dead” in the 90’s - yet still continues to grow in ever-increasing incarnations and volume to this day with no end in sight.  Why?  The promise and delivery of VALUE to the business.  The concept of “frictionless” trade between companies is Nirvana, and though in theory would be perfect, much like a perfect vacuum, will never be completely achieved. 

Since we know there will always be some friction, let’s discuss this from two perspectives internal to organizations: Financial/Business and Technical.

First is the Financial/Business view.

CEOs, CFOs and others with fiduciary responsibilities are driven to maximize revenue and decrease costs to deliver the financial performance on which their jobs depend.  To do so, they need timely data and usable tools to access the data, to help them make sound financial decisions.  Okay, that’s a given.

Most recently these business needs have given rise to new technologies to deliver information with Big Data Analytics, IIOT, and an ever-evolving landscape that is frankly dizzying to these fiduciary stakeholders.  They care about the “what”, not the “how” - unless those solutions affect their performance measures (cost too much and/or take too long to achieve the business value).

So, this takes us to the second perspective, the Technical view.  Businesses trust their technology teams to evaluate, choose, and utilize technology to help them achieve their business objectives.  All know that the technology landscape (or battlefield) is exploding with ever-new and promising solutions.  It is also littered with a lot of their graves, and frankly, even a lot of careers.  It is indeed an exciting and dangerous landscape.

There are many “heroes” out there too, and many more are needed.  Security, AI/Machine learning, Photonics, Blockchain, and many others come to mind.  Thank goodness bright minds across the globe are pushing our capabilities on so many of these fronts!

BUSINESS VALUE (positive or negative) occurs at the intersection of these two perspectives, which leads us back to our question: “If EDI is a mature technology, why is it still so hard and expensive?”

Common answers abound, summarized as something like, “It’s the best we’re ever going to get without throwing a lot more money at it.  We’ve been on this road a long time and have reached the point of diminishing returns.  Yes, it is a pain point we, of course, would like to solve - but all our experts agree the time and cost to fix it is not worth the trade-offs.  Our resources are better spent elsewhere on our core business.”  In the end, it’s a resignation to accepting lower business value.

Why haven’t traditional integration companies solved it?  Because vendors focus on maximizing their OWN valuations first, rather than their customers’ through high software licensing and consultancy costs, transactional pricing models that are often exponentially expensive once a customer is “locked in,” and complicated deployments that make it very hard to change.

So is there a better way?  YES!!!

The new “David” on the battlefield of “Goliaths”, brings a revolutionary approach that is really quite simple:  DI. Platform. A lightweight. NET-based software stack on minimal x86 infrastructure that can handle very small to massive workloads. Deployable on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model. It provides a real-time view of all B2B traffic in a role-based dashboard for business and technical users, that is non-disruptive to current processes and priced is at a fraction of traditional and even new “solutions”.

Sound too good to be true?  The proof is in the pudding, as they say.  A very quick analysis will provide the proof and leave evaluators asking, “Why hasn’t anyone done this before?”  We wonder the same… 
Contact us to learn more.

0 Likes

Modernize EDI: Is Your Modern Business Running On Outdated Platforms?

Using the Aidant DI.Platform will unlock the full potential and maximize IT spend on licenses and other expenses for the EDI Team. Make your business teams more efficient and focused on business and not IT issues.

Does your EDI & data integrations team perform functions around B2B, A2A, and ETL? Are those functions used to perform services such as data transformation (mapping), communications (sftp, As2, web services, HTTP, etc.)? Is data from internal line of business systems such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Lawson, MS Dynamic and home grown ERP systems, sent and received between your Trading Partners (suppliers, customers)? Are you also connecting with external web-based systems such as Salesforce, WorkDay, and services hosted on AWS and Azure Cloud infrastructure.

If the answer is “YES” to any of these questions, it is likely that you are using some bulky integration tools such as Coast, WebMethods, WebSphere, Sterling Integrator, BizTalk, Mercator, or similar products. In rare cases, you may be using the old-school custom application that you developed in the 1980s. Or you may be the courageous few using cloud-based services to connect to the trading partners.

💡  See our recent blog post on using current cloud-based integration platforms.

The Limitation Of Traditional Methods

Traditional EDI tools such as those mentioned above have worked great for the last decade or so. However, given the current technological advancements and desire to be aggressively efficient, the traditional methods of data integration lack features that should be a basic requirement of any platform. These features can make or break any business, large or small, in the ever-changing current landscape.

Having access to these necessary features can give companies critical tools to grow and operate efficiently. Allowing businesses to focus on their customers and suppliers rather than spending time (and budget) with their IT teams.

Critical Features For Data Integration Platforms

1. Ease of onboarding customer and suppliers to trade and exchange documents electronically

2. Customize and implement customer rulebook requirements based on industry-standard or custom data formats

3. End-to-end visibility of data coming in and out of the ERP systems

4. Real-time data warehousing/data mining of transactions to avoid dependencies on long-running/reactive ETL or batch processes that feed into business intelligence tools

5. Ease of connectivity with trading partners and ERP systems through harmonized implementation of various secure protocols

6. Search functionality for customer service and other business teams in one central location to get all the answers regarding data

7. Standardization and templating of change management and other development tasks and production support

8. Easy subscription of critical alerts and events that take place during data processing via email or text 

Cloud-Ready And Scalable

Aidant’s DI.Platform is fully service-oriented and cloud-ready. The DI.Platform offers an agnostic model that provides scalability over older solutions.

For example, connections to retailer rulebooks need to be perpetually updated. Traditional solutions require manually updating individual instances for each retailer connection a supplier may have. However, with Aidant’s DI.Platform these updates are replicated instantly across all business units and also all suppliers for a given customer. Retailers (ie. Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco) also have rulebooks containing standards and formats in which distributors and suppliers must comply. When a new supplier wishes to do business with a new retailer, the retailer requires the supplier to be tested for compliance of its rulebook. The testing and implementations are streamlined with Aidant’s implementations. Suppliers using it can get to market faster and avoid vendor chargebacks and headaches presented by traditional platforms.

Get greater visibility, tracking, and tools to scale and support business with DI.Platform. Lower total cost of ownership and hidden costs that arise from unwanted production support, outages and vendor chargebacks that cost business their hard-earned margins. Don’t let data integration and EDI hold you back from doing business with your trading partners.

Apply integrations with greater confidence and information with Aidant.

Why EDI?

Consider the hundreds of documents you have to process every day in order to run your business. Consider all of the time it takes to interface all of these documents with other businesses and systems in order to keep moving forward. Are you as efficient as you need to be to succeed?

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solutions are designed to help you manage this massive amount of paperwork. Savings in time, potential errors from mistyped or incorrectly logged information, the impact on the environment—all of these are important considerations when you’re looking into an EDI solution for your business.

• EDI continues to prove its business value by lowering costs, improving speed, accuracy and business efficiency. The greatest EDI benefits often come at the strategic business level.

• Expenses associated with paper, printing, reproduction, storage, filing, postage and document retrieval are all reduced or eliminated when you switch to EDI transactions, lowering your transaction costs by at least 35%.

• EDI can speed up your business cycles up to 60%. Process transactions in minutes instead of the days or weeks required when using traditional paper-based systems.

• Improves data quality, delivering at least a 30-40% reduction in transaction errors-eliminating problems resulting from illegible handwriting, lost faxes/mail and keying errors.

• Enables real-time visibility into the status of transactions. This in turn enables faster decision-making and improved responsiveness to changing customer and market demands, and allows businesses to adopt a demand-driven business model rather than a supply-driven one.

Three Things You Need To Know About EDI/EAI & Middleware Costs!

Software Licensing Costs Will Continue To Grow

Companies large and small spend a significant portion of their IT operational budgets on renewing the various software licenses. Additionally, capital budget investments are spent on infrastructure upgrades every 3-5 years, which force further spend on new licenses with the new platforms. These costs continue to compound when additional resources are added to the team or external consultants to do the work or up-train existing EDI staff to keep up with these upgrades. All this is done while ensuring business continuity and making sure their departments/teams are addressing business needs to contribute to company growth.

SaaS (Cloud) Providers May Have Proprietary Integration Needs (And Ongoing Costs)

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) based systems make sense initially, with quick implementation promises. However, SaaS potentially comes with proprietary integration methods which necessitate ongoing subscription costs and may make migrations or non-standard integration very painful in the future. Therefore, SaaS is not a preferred approach for most long-term EDI/EAI integration roadmaps.

Custom EDI/EAI Implementations Can Be More Efficient

The EDI/EAI and Middleware Stack solve essential business functions, such as:

• Connect trading partners (protocols)

• Analyze & Route data

• Map services (transformations)

• Mine data

• Implement business logic and rules (BPM)

• Report errors and exceptions

• Provide visibility into business operations

• Onboard new customers and vendors (B2B)

• Connect one or many applications to each other (A2A)

• Support batch or scheduled functions

By implementing a custom EDI/EAI integration with industry-focused platforms, the implementation can support your specific business needs. Additionally, the implementation team will support the specific integrations that your business needs while simultaneously minimizing the number of software licenses needed and not requiring ongoing subscription costs.

The ongoing work of implementing or maintaining EDI/EAI & Middleware platforms; keeping the systems up-to-date; on-boarding new partners; taking care of business needs while keeping business users happy; supporting all the cutting-edge toolsets out there; and keeping internal staff up-trained and motivated can all feel like trying to change a tire on the car while driving down the road.

Or maybe, it can be more appropriately described by one line from Scotty in Star Trek Into Darkness
“The notion of transwarp beaming is like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse”.

EDI/EAI can appear to be overwhelming, but Aidant Technologies can help you streamline and simplify your integrations both operationally and financially. You can be in control of the costs and functionality. We will show you how we achieve end-to-end functionality with flexibility and lower ongoing licensing and migrations costs. We use Microsoft tools and technology to support EDI and all data integration needs through our ready to implement data integration platform.