ec-bp Bloggers |
Jun 14
2008
|
Outsourcing Gone AwryPosted by Tracy Loetz in Untagged   |
|
I’m sure all of you have heard of both the success and failure of companies outsourcing their EDI development and support to offshore IT consulting firms.
REMEDI has been involved with several customers that have decided to take this path. The plan was to have consultants from the offshore company come to the United States to get trained for 6-8 weeks, return to their country, and within a few weeks be able to take over the EDI department.
Unfortunately, they have all failed, and these were not small failures. We are talking huge companies.
It seems to me that companies have failed to understand the importance of the business knowledge that EDI resources possess. I have always said that EDI is 20% technical and 80% business. EDI is technically quite easy. It is the business knowledge of how the data is used and what the data means and the interaction with your trading partner to get the right data that is most important. How can this be trained in two months?
REMEDI has been involved with several customers that have decided to take this path. The plan was to have consultants from the offshore company come to the United States to get trained for 6-8 weeks, return to their country, and within a few weeks be able to take over the EDI department.
Unfortunately, they have all failed, and these were not small failures. We are talking huge companies.
It seems to me that companies have failed to understand the importance of the business knowledge that EDI resources possess. I have always said that EDI is 20% technical and 80% business. EDI is technically quite easy. It is the business knowledge of how the data is used and what the data means and the interaction with your trading partner to get the right data that is most important. How can this be trained in two months?
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
I tend to think of EDI being just the opposite - about 80% technical and 20% business...
I'm the EDI Coordinator for a fairly large retailer in the Western US. We've got over 400 stores in 10 states and do pretty well...
I started with the company in the "help desk" - i.e. tech support - supporting our stores and our internal users... I then went into AS/400 operations and left that store part behind - supporting only internal users... from there, I came into the EDI gig....
Now, mind you, it should be said that prior to this, I've got about 20 years of experience in Customer Service and retail - from store management, display & merchandising management and other customer service gigs.... I've got a pretty good technical head on My shoulders from having a parent that's been programming since the 70s...
I don't truly know the business process of My company - except to buy product low, get it into stores and sell it for a profit. Not a whole lot more to understand about that process....
But the EDI side of things - now THAT requires knowledge and abilities... to be able to take bits and bytes of data from the system, pull data from this field, this file and this record and populate a document that can be sent to another company, where they "de-populate" the document into their own files, fields and records.
It's understanding THAT process that is more important than the business process.