Friday, March 20, 2015

Decision Time: In-House or Leverage Existing EDI Technologies

Based on your readings of the "Making informed decisions", "EDI Education", and the "Trading Partner Requirements" you now know what is needed.  It is ok, at this point, if you do not know how to fit "EDI" into your organization.  That is the point of this article.

Each trading partner has their own expectations of what they would like for you to do.  Some may want to exchange the retailer transactions, and other the carrier transactions.  In that case, the EDI system would need to "plug" into your ERP and TMS systems.  Does this seem like a lot of work?  Well, it is.  So the first decision is whether or not to take your entire EDI processing "in house" or to use get some help from a 3rd party.  You can buy costly EDI software which requires computer servers, communication software, and people to run and maintain these on a daily basis; and you will need to keep up with your "Hubs" ever changing EDI requirements.

Or another solution is to leverage pre-existing software from using a 3rd party.  Those solutions and services are plentiful.  Here are a few,

Let's say you want to run your own in-house software, or you already have your own EDI system, you can still leverage off of the EDI VAN solution.  Doing so could help reduce your monthly VAN bill.  Not much work for lots of savings.

Or you want to outsource your entire EDI processing to a 3rd party.  In essence, to have the outsourcer become your "EDI Department".  Many EDI companies provide this service as well.

Or, perhaps, you are pressured by one or two companies to do EDI, and you do not have anything that resembles an I.T. staff.  EDI Web technology exists to trade EDI via your web browser.

These are to name just a few.  There are more EDI Solutions available as you will see by reviewing the above links.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

The Relationship Components of EDI

"Making Informed Decisions about your EDI Initiative" requires an understanding of the components of the EDI relationships.  The jobisez.com can help broaden your knowledge of this understanding.  The website has 400+ pages defining the trading partners that exchange EDI.  There are over 75 pages dedicated to the transaction sets; and there are more than 1400 pages containing a wide variety of Implementation Guides.

The Trading Partner pages are easy to browse.  There you will find out which set ids each trading partner exchanges, there EDI envelope IDs, versions, and more.

The Transaction Sets defines the purpose of each transaction, which trading partners exchange them, and point you to many of the guidelines.  These guidelines will help you better understand the requirements of how each trading partner uses the EDI standards.

Also, we are pleased to announce a new feature to the jobisez.com website.  The new feature will allow you to build your very own EDI Website Portal.  The intent of this new feature is to allow those companies that cannot create a website with their EDI requirements.  When a company has their EDI requirements available online, then their trading partners can search for that portal and, hopefully, reduce the number of phone calls received by the EDI Coordinators.

Knowing how the relationship components work together is the purpose of the Jobisez LLC's EDI pages.

See also (added 3/21/2015):
EDI Education
Decision Time

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Faster is Better (Part 3)

Jobisez LLC knows that your time is valuable and that you do not need to sit and wait for a webpage to load.  So Jobisez LLC has tripled its bandwidth.  You will not really notice much of a time speed change on pages like the homepage, because pages like that are relatively small and have already been optimized for peak performance.  However, with many large EDI Implementation Guidelines on the site, IGs that are large PDFs, you will notice a large performance gain on your side.

Jobisez LLC has always known that when seeking an answer on the web, Faster is Better.  Jobisez LLC may not have the most Trading Partners on the web, the most Transaction Sets on the web, the most Solutions, the most Services, but the site has all that and is free to use without requiring a sign-in ID.

Only when communication is needed, does Jobisez LLC ask that you Create a Logon Id.  This is only required because emails are sent to you for Services such as EDI 852 Conversions, or if you ask for a RFQ on an EDI Solution like an EDI VAN quote.

It is Jobisez LLC's hope that your time surfing the jobisez.com website is fast and pleasurable.

Jobisez LLC.