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Take this QUIZ: Is your business cut out for on-premises EDI software?

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.

As an EDI expert, I receive many questions related to deployment of the EDI software. โ€œShould our business go with on-premises or โ€œin the cloudโ€?โ€ As many business executives are not sure which way to go, I have listed a few questions that will make their EDI deployment decision easier.

Below are the right questions to ask yourself in order to make the best decisions for your company when it comes time to implementing EDI software.

Please note: if your major problem is how to integrate EDI with JDE, please refer to my previous blog entitled, โ€˜How to Solve the Biggest EDI Integration Problems with JDEโ€™.

1. Do we have the proper in-house EDI expertise?

Before making any decision about how to deploy EDI2XML, Namtekโ€™s EDI conversion solution, or any other EDI software internally, one should ask the very basic question: Do we have an IT professional in-house with a basic understanding of EDI? A basic understanding is all an IT expert needs when dealing with EDI2XML on premises.

2. Do we have the expertise to work with XML?

The second question is of course asking whether your internal IT team has the necessary capabilities and expertise to work with XML and its schemas. An IT professional having expertise in XML is much more probable than EDI expertise. However, never assume, as it is always best to confirm this beforehand.

3. Do we have enough time for our IT resources?

Once you realize you have an in-house IT team with the expertise in EDI and XML, you need to evaluate if they have enough time to handle an EDI implementation project. Many executives underestimate the time and effort involved in EDI communication, especially if their IT team is handling other priority projects and tasks. The same question should be asked if the company does not have an in-house team and has hired outside IT consultants for their day-to-day IT needs.

Read: SaaS EDI or On-Premises EDI Translation Software: What you should know

4. Do we have the necessary IT infrastructure?

Another very important factor to consider before deploying EDI translation software on premises is your companyโ€™s current IT infrastructure. If your current hardware and infrastructure cannot support an EDI software solution, then it is time to invest, which can of course add more costs to your projectโ€™s budget. Nowadays, many business executives do not want to worry about this and have opted for โ€œcloud-basedโ€ software services. Adopting SaaS solutions (Software as a Service) does not require any investment in IT hardware and infrastructure.

5. Can my current ERP software handle EDI integration?

Any time there is an integration project within a company, a crucial question to ask is if your current ERP software (if your company even has one) can handle EDI integration, or any add-on software integration. If your company is still running a legacy software system or out-dated software, with no support and maintenance, integration becomes very difficult. The best way to go for any integration project, including EDI, is to begin with an upgradable and scalable management software solution where integration is easy and quick.

Please review my article about the importance of fully integrated software in a business of any size.

Where do we go from here?

If youโ€™ve answered โ€œYESโ€ to all 5 questions above, then your company is suited for an on-premises EDI implementation process. However, if youโ€™ve answered โ€œNOโ€ to at least one of the questions, then it is best to go with an EDI conversion service that does the complex work while your team of IT consultations take care of the integration with your internal software system. If however you do not have an internal IT team, then simply go with an EDI software solution โ€œin the cloudโ€ with full service. At this point, you wouldnโ€™t need any IT infrastructure or in-house IT team as all you would need to do is hire an outside team of EDI experts to implement and handle the EDI communication. Please check out our EDI2XML as a Service for more information on how an EDI solution โ€œin the cloudโ€ works.

If you need further help in determining what the best steps are for your company, I am be happy to offer my teamโ€™s long time EDI and systemsโ€™ integration expertise for a Free Consultation.

Free EDI consultation

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Free EDI to XML converter: What’s the catch?

This post was updated to reflect current trends and information.

Free EDI to XML converter

Recently, I have received many questions and inquiries about our EDI2XML technology and why it is not offered for โ€œfreeโ€ like many apps or tools available on the Internet. Just the other day, an acquaintance of mine was contesting that he could find another API for EDI conversion to XML, download it and use it โ€œfree of chargeโ€. I decided to write this blog post to share my past experience with free EDI to XML conversion tools and hopefully give you more insight into why a Free EDI to XML converter is NOT a good option for your business.
EDI2XML converter

Being an EDI professional, I realize and implement EDI projects. I have encountered many situations where I needed to accomplish urgent and quick results using any code I could find in the moment; library or API that can be downloaded quickly from the Internet for FREE! Everyone likes free things and I am no exception to this.

Therefore, during one of my first experimental EDI projects, I found a free tool to convert EDI to XML. Once I downloaded the tool, I started to work on how to turn EDI X12 to XML, and vice versa. Below are the observations I noted from that experience:

Limited help

After running the setup program, I hit a few installation errors. I then started the process of identifying these issues, however, I found this process to be very hard, long and tedious since only some of the errors were documented, while most of them were not. In addition, I had to write to the community of the support team. I received a reply two days later, which is a terrible response time if you are in a hurry. We found the issue to be some .NET compatibility between the installer and the operating system I had on my machine.

Features: fell below expectations

After the long installation process, I was finally glad that my Free EDI converter to XML was setup properly. It was now time to experiment its conversion features. Unfortunately, it wasnโ€™t long before I was disappointed over the fact that this converter had many limitations. It was not converting the EDI to XML based on a format I was expecting. It simply put the XML tags before and after each EDI element and grouped each one of the segments into node. This is not any easier than working with raw EDI. In addition, the tool was not able to convert XML back to EDI. Therefore, the simple features it promised were not even working.

โ€œBlack Boxโ€ solution

I didnโ€™t give up just yet. I then figured that if I can tweak the code through parameters or code modification, it could work. Unfortunately, that was not possible; I had downloaded a โ€œblack boxโ€ solution where I cannot do any modifications or tweaks to my needs.

Little or no support

At this point, I decided to contact, yet again, the community of support as well as the software developer. Unfortunately, the support offered by the developer was an expensive paying option. In addition, if I wanted to customize the engine, I would need to pay a high fee. Bottom line, I wasnโ€™t left with many choices. I had to live with the community support, which was relatively good, but not like any commercial support where response time is on average 2-4 hours.

Read: Convert EDI to XML: the Winning SaaS Option

Lack of scalability

In the end, we hit a wall with the converter. In order for me to reach my expectations with this converter, I would need to pay for a custom job. Once it is custom made, scalability becomes on us, based on how much money we can invest in developing the tool and make it scalable. At this point, I was hesitant, since I would have gone from a Free EDI to XML converter to a very expensive tool. However, if we stuck with the basic free option, then it is quite clear, the EDI conversion tool would not perform, as we had needed.

Is it a feasible approach?

Having gone through all of the above, we took a step back to reassess what our options were. Should we invest in upgrading a Free EDI to XML converter or should we build it from scratch in-house?

We needed to ask ourselves if it was a feasible approach to have a business depend on a free tool, knowing in advance it is a โ€œblack boxโ€ without support and scalability.

Our answer was โ€œNOโ€. This is when we decided to go ahead with our alternative solution.

EDI2XML, an alternative

Having spent much time exploring the possibilities of using a Free EDI to XML converter, we came to the conclusion that we would be better off building it ourselves. Our goal was to make it quick, easy, affordable and simple to deploy for us and for our clients with the capability of translating XML to EDI, and vice versa. Other pre-requisites were to ensure scalability and flexibility of EDI2XML as well as the availability of a great support team for EDI2XML. In the end, we succeeded! Our very own EDI2XML solution is offered  as a Services  and HTTP service  for companies of all sizes.

EDI2XML Web Service is for developers and businesses, interested in building their own EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) integration flows and programs. Normally, these individuals, are capable of interacting with external API and Web Services to translate EDI to XML and XML to EDI, and have the resources and expertise to work with Web Services and HTTP requests in order to achieve their goals. EDI2XML web service, is the premier choice for IT people as a reliable service to accomplish such Integration projects.

 

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