Major Retailer's EDI Department Challenges Revealed

Today, we were talking with A Top 5 Major Retailer and they shared with us two surprising insights about their systems and their daily interactions that “jam up” their EDI processes – a community of 6,000+ vendors.

Issues Reported by A Top 5 Major Retailer

• Our entire EDI system can be brought down by a single character " ~ ". When Our AS2 Software receives an EDI document with a missing segment separator " ~ " in the ISA segment it crashes the AS2 system and all data stops flowing. Thousands of Vendors are not able to send us their documents nor can we send any documents out. While this can impact thousands of vendors at the same time, a single hour of down time seems like days.
• From the mouth of the EDI Coordinator/Detectives/Babysitters/Negotiators/...... We support thousands of vendors and I just "Love" it when one calls in and expects me to know them by company name. It's not easy to locate a vendor in a system by company name when are sifting through more than 6,000 active vendors. Half of my time on the phone is spent listening to dead silence while the person on the other end locates the vendor number or an ISA ID as I go through a list of 200 Apex Inc. and Apex LLC. entries and typically, 30 minutes later I find myself explaining the difference between "Inc." and "LLC"....

Expert Advise by: Steve Slavutskiy, Director of Enterprise Services

Managing Direct Connect operations inside your internal EDI department was a noble idea as a response to exuberant transactional charges that existed in a traditional VAN model. However, the cost of maintaining connectivity with hundreds of vendors does not leave any savings gained from elimination of VAN traffic. When the business documents are not flowing via VAN they flow in a black-box. There is no easy visibility to what happens with data when it fails. There is no easy way to locate a missing document, and that’s just the laundry list of issues before the data even makes it to production environments. What if bad data propagates amongst several internal systems? Hundreds of collective hours are spent every time it happens.

Consider Outsourcing your Direct Connect Operation to Direct EDI, Inc. Our Direct Connect Manager that has the following capabilities:

• Sheds light into your direct connect traffic
• Shares an interface with hub and each individual Trading Partner.
• Validates EDI-data, based on Trading Partner Maps in production Environment
• Monitors and Notifies both parties as Exceptions occur
• Monitors and Notifies both parties about missing or rejected Acknowledgements
• Provides interface to troubleshoot and analyze error handling, missing documents

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