Today’s EDI Requires Real-time Transactions
Posted by Jim Cantrell on July 1, 2011
Today’s supply chains are much more complex and demanding than they were a few years ago. In many scenarios this means is we must respond to orders with more documents faster than just an Advanced Ship Notice or Invoice. It means buyers and sellers are dependent on each other and their upstream trading partners for information. To prevent bottlenecks and general disruptions data must not be held up in a queue and they can’t be ‘dropped’.
We have all heard stories about late data causing compliance problems. If you are shipping from a facility to a customer who is also located in your region (city, county), you have to be careful that your ASNs don’t arrive after your shipment does. It’s a ten minute drive for a truck – why does it take 45-60 minutes for your EDI data to get there? Several VANs have come up with a pseudo “hotbox” for data that by service level agreement can’t sit more than “x” minutes. This is a good start, but you shouldn’t have to pay a premium for this type of service, when real-time B2B integration is becoming a requirement to run your business.
Business runs on information, and if you’re using a VAN, then your information will usually never be less than an hour old (in many cases several hours old). It’s not like the Pony Express, with a single rider racing along with a handful of letters, but rather, it more closely resembles a line at Disneyland in the summer. At Disneyland, people understand and accept that the best rides mean standing in line for 45 minutes or more. With EDI, maybe you’ve just accepted long waits as part of the process, too, but the reality is you don’t have to nor is it good for your business.
What’s more, like amusement park rides, VANs can break down. Redundancy is something else that must be considered when evaluating your B2B integration provider. EDI-L, an EDI user group I frequent commonly has discussions about one VAN or another being down for periods of time (as in hours). A broken down ride brings frustration and lower customer satisfaction, but a broken down VAN means potentially lost revenue, late orders and other negative impact to your business.
I don’t think batch processing is going away any time soon. But I do think there are better technologies available which can route your data faster and more reliably than the Value Added Network of the last century. We need to be moving in real time.
Tags: ANSI X12, Batch EDI Processing, EDI VAN, EDI-L
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