Obstacles on the path to your own EDI interface Part I

To define an EDI interface on your own can be challenging if you have no experience in this matter. What content should be transmitted? How should the message be structured? Which elements contribute to a success of the project? In the first part of this series, we focus mainly on aspects that are important in the preparation before the actual design of the interface.

Success or failure at the implementation of an EDI interface depend in many cases on the depth and speed of the cooperation of your partners. Both factors are related to a certain degree to the influence that you can exert on your partners. If you are the most important customer of your suppliers, they will be rather willing to introduce new interfaces or change existing ones than if you are only one market participant amongst many. You should keep this correlation in mind when you are designing your EDI interface because it affects the project success in many ways.

Especially if you do not yet possess experience in designing an EDI interface, it is worthwhile to consult suitable partner on this matter. Business partners that have already designed interfaces themselves can be especially helpful. Moreover, if you would like to rollout the interface to a multitude of bigger and smaller partners, it will certainly not hurt to consider the opinion of smaller partners. As they are also supposed to operate the interface, they possibly might have legitimate objections that bigger partners do not know about. First and foremost, prototype partners should be able to provide contacts and resources for the whole duration of the project. They should give you helpful feedback that you can use for final revisions of your interface, before you roll it out in depth.

In many cases, the main goal of an EDI interface is to reduce human labor. However, to avoid disappointment from unfulfilled expectations, you should check whether EDI is always the best solution. To create a mapping or to configure it for a partner and to setup an EDI connection costs working time, just as exchanging and rectify test messages before the go live. If only a couple of documents are then exchanged via EDI per year, the effort may surpass the benefit, especially if the partner is not able to provide flawless data. In general, your project should not depend on perfect quality of every document and no transmission gaps. Rather, you should think about how many percent of all documents have to be transmitted with flawless EDI data at least to meet the business goals of the EDI interface.

Please find here part II and part III of our series.