It's that time of year where many of us are making our lists and checking them twice. And if you’re making investments in Microsoft Dynamics add-on solutions, you should add them to your list and evaluate just how naughty or nice those investments have been to your business this year.
When it comes to Dynamics EDI solutions, it’s not too hard for them to find their way on to the “Naughty List,” even if EDI seemed to operate as planned this past year. While you may have been able to successfully transact with your trading partners, just because your solution works doesn’t necessarily mean it belongs on the “Nice List.” Many EDI solutions can get the job done, but how they get it done could easily move them over to “Naughty.”
Here are 6 Signs that Your EDI Solution Has Been Naughty, Not Nice:
- Your EDI solution uses a 3rd-party to handle integration or translation.
By employing a separate solution to handle translation apart from integration, you’ve introduced a separate point of failure and divided the responsibility for true end-to-end EDI processing which inhibits your ability to manage EDI efficiently and cost-effectively. - The solution requires customization to the ERP to integrate it.
Only by using a well-architected solution that tightly integrates EDI without customization can you avoid the unpredictable costs in development, maintaining EDI and when required, updating from one Microsoft Dynamics version to another. - The EDI solution requires software to be installed to achieve “integration.”
Integrating EDI data into ERP platforms is complex, but true integration is achievable. If your solution requires additional software to be installed in order to integrate data, ERP upgrades and other technology updates will multiply the complexity of the situation, inhibiting your ability to manage EDI efficiently and cost-effectively. - On-staff EDI resources are required to manage your EDI investment.
If you require onsite resources to handle extra procedures and ERP programming to make EDI work, you’re exposing your business to more risk, while increasing the costs and resources required to handle EDI mapping, setup and integration. - Your trading partners allow for direct connect, but your EDI solution does not.
An EDI provider’s inability to support direct connect, even though your trading partner(s) can, results in unnecessary and unpredictable fees. - The solution provider creates files for you to integrate.
A truly integrated solution with the Dynamics ERP should automatically integrate all of the required EDI data, but some providers simply prepare the files for you, leaving you to manually integrate the data, increasing the risk for costly errors.
You have to know what questions to ask in order to differentiate between all of the available Dynamics EDI solutions, and at this time of the year especially, to determine which ones are “Naughty” and which ones are “Nice” for your business. Take a look at the EDI for Microsoft Dynamics Evaluation Check List for help in distinguishing the differences between EDI offerings.
Happy Holidays from Data Masons!
by Data Masons Software