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EDI Converter Migrations
Industry: Enterprise Integration Software
Brief: Expedite EDI converter migration projects by providing optimal implementation plans and automatic extraction of mapping rules using production data.
Value Delivered: AI-powered automatic mapping system reducing costs of converter migration projects by 30-70%.
An innovative tool, the woyb EDI Navigator, makes it possible to implement an EDI migration semi-automatically. Find out here how you can achieve a truly reliable and efficient implementation of the EDIFACT and SAP IDoc interfaces.
The situation costs nerves and resources - and the stakes are high: an EDI migration is imminent. There is little to gain, but a lot to lose. If mistakes are made, problems can quickly arise that have a lasting negative impact on customer relationships.
An innovative tool such as the WOYB EDI Navigator can significantly reduce the effort and risks of an EDI migration. The tool automatically analyzes and evaluates the productively exchanged data and thus enables fast and reliable EDI migration. The previous black box becomes a transparent process.
The importance of a reliable EDI migration cannot be underestimated, as business-critical processes need to be re-implemented. Bear in mind:
The largest and highest-revenue customers are usually connected via EDI. Incorrect implementation can quickly lead to serious business problems.
The entire order-to-cash process of these major customers often depends on smooth electronic data exchange. Any stumbling block in this process can have lasting negative consequences.
An impaired supplier evaluation and the loss of orders are realistic consequences of difficulties in EDI migration.
Risks and problems with traditional EDI migration
Traditional EDI migration processes face several challenges. A central problem is often the lack of up-to-date and clearly understandable mapping specifications. This leads to mappings being created on the basis of the customer's interface descriptions and/or a limited amount of productively exchanged data. If the descriptions are available, they can be very extensive and unnecessarily time-consuming to implement, as only parts of them are actually relevant for your own business. If implementation is based solely on individual data records, special cases, such as special surcharges or discounts in invoices or unusual packaging types in delivery bills, are often not taken into account. The consequences range from additional IT costs and late payments to a production standstill at the customer.
Another challenge is the isolated approach in which interfaces are analyzed and implemented individually without identifying commonalities. This process offers no insight into the homogeneity or heterogeneity, scope or complexity of the interfaces, which makes it difficult to make a realistic estimate of the effort involved and leads to a haphazard approach to implementation.
Similar to the implementation procedure, quality assurance is carried out on the basis of a small number of data records. The expected result is the same: the risk that not all scenarios are covered. In addition, the specialist department is often involved in the quality assurance process. This means that employees are taken away from their regular tasks to take part in the creation of the EDI tests. Although the involvement of the specialist department can contribute to accuracy, it ties up valuable resources and increases the overall cost of the migration project.
EDI migration with the help of data analytics approaches
The use of the woyb EDI Navigator for automated analysis and evaluation addresses the difficulties and risks described above and enables a much smoother and more efficient implementation of the migration. The implementation, with the associated benefits, can be summarized in three steps:
Step 1: Transparency
The first step is the automated analysis of all EDI data relevant to the exchange with each partner. This makes it possible to precisely understand the scope and complexity of each interface.
Step 2: Implementation
In the second step, an efficient implementation plan is drawn up automatically. This involves comparing the EDI partners with each other to identify commonalities, which significantly speeds up the implementation process.
Step 3: Quality assurance
The third step is quality assurance. First, the IT test cases are identified automatically. For this purpose, the structurally unique characteristics per interface are determined, with each characteristic serving as a test case to ensure that the mapping covers the entire scope. Before the new interfaces go live, all productive data from the last few months is processed again via the new system and the results are compared at document level to complete quality assurance.
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