I have to agree with Dave, if immediate response and action is key, then keep it in house. I am sure you have gotten tons of sales people responding to you by now, you have proposed a very lucrative sale.
It sounds like you have a very good understanding of your system. I suggest you put together an RFQ which includes everything you must have, all the things you'd like to have and top it off with your wish list. Also, this is a good time to think about the things that don't work so well or that give you pain and have the sales people tell you how they can eliminate your current problems (without causing different ones, of course). Make sure you or someone with a similar or better knowledge of your existing system is in on all the demos and request demo copies to "play with". Never, never take "yes it can do that, but I can't tell you how" for an answer. Also, understand that "we can meet that need" does not mean the product will do what you need/want out of the box. At best, it will mean some clearly documented and easily integrated and understood augmentation of the product. At worst, you'll get some kludged together, expensive piece of junk that won't do anything close to what you need. Make certain you understand what you're being told in the demo and do not be afraid to ask for details. The sales person probably won't be able to give you detailed answers but if they can't offer you a contact who can or they don't get back to you with an answer quickly, then be very skeptical of everything they say. Oh, and make sure that list of "must haves" includes things that you would assume every decent translator would have, like a user friendly TP set up interface, the ability to create a syntactically correct FA, reconcile and report on FA's received/missed and error reporting. Insist on seeing an error report and make the demonstrator show you how to track the error back to the ERP/sender document. You would be surprised at some major products that either don't offer one or more of these things or that charge extra for them. Finally, if this seems a bit overwhelming, there are a number of people on this list who would be happy to give you more or less unbiased assistance in reviewing your system, creating an RFQ and dealing with vendors. Having worked on a single, homegrown system for 15 years, purchasing something new will be daunting and you may be tempted to believe the sales people. Don't. Good Luck, Leah ________________________________ From: Dave Records <[email protected]> To: karnaf62 <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Sent: Sun, March 27, 2011 9:51:36 PM Subject: Re: [EDI-L] What should I do with our vast EDI system? Well, I think your last next to last line says it all! Fast and reliable response! In my experience, the only way to get that is to keep it in house and the fact that you recognize the criticality of EDI to your business would also point to that. You will have to spend some money to update your translator, but there are many good ones. I'm very familiar with Gentran for UNIX and Windows and prefer the UNIX for the functionality it brings. I saw something about it being available on LINUX but have not checked that out myself. There are also other good options for translators that maybe less expensive, such as SoftShare - or whatever it is now. I've contracted at companies where it was outsourced and at companies where we did it in house and the ability to respond swiftly and accurately was at least 3 to 5 times better at in house facilities as opposed to outsourced. At the companies who outsourced, I was mainly a project manager facilitating between the ERP developers (overseas, so a time differential) and the EDI developers. It sometimes would take weeks to get changes made, and months to implement a new customer or supplier! Very frustrating. There is one other option I've never explored, but Boomi Software offers a "Cloud" service where I believe you still do all the work, but the translator is hosted on their systems. When I worked with the product initially, it was installed on a local machine and I thought it was great. Approaching the idea of Sterling Integrator, but much easier and less resource intensive. I was disappointed to hear they did away with the freestanding product, but still considered it a good product. The bottom line in my opinion is that you would lose control of a very important piece of your business ifyou outsourced it as you would be bound by other's work loads and priorities which you would have no control over. Good Luck! Dave Records On Mar 27, 2011, at 6:43 PM, karnaf62 wrote: > We have an in-house EDI server, EDI software, 100s of trading partners, 15 >different EDI transactions, X12 and XML, various custom-files exchanged using >EDI between several in-house systems and much more. > > > Since we are a "Vendor" and our Trading Partners are "The Customer", > according >to EDI de-facto rules, we have a custom map for each TP/Transaction. > > This vast system is a product of my hard work for over 15 years at my company . > > Everything is working very well, self supported, no issues. > > But(!), nothing will stay the same for ever... including myself (I moving to > a >new role in the company) and our aging EDI system that will have to be >replaced >by new software (i.e. throw away all the current maps and setups and write >them >from scratch). > > We are not opposed to outsourcing, especially with EDI which, in general, >requires a one-time setup for each interchange and not much of maintenance >after >that. > > But, because we are so dependent on EDI with our customers (EDI brings more >than 90% of our sales) we want costs to be down, and fast response to changes >and new setups. > > > What would you recommend? > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ ... 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