Making EDI work requires lots of planning

If your organization has stumbled and failed at electronic data integration (EDI), don't feel too bad as it's an technology effort that clearly isn't easy as it's a complex effort on the technology side. Integrating your business with supply-chain partners and sharing is a collaborative effort that requires partners to do as much work as you're doing, and getting that accomplished isn't a quick task. To make it successful, you have to make sure your suppliers and partners gain as much benefit as your organization in the effort, otherwise you're not going to gain the potential efficiency that EDI can provide. The other important aspect is deciding how much EDI to do--how many partners to hook up with and which ones are a necessity and which ones aren't in terms of data exchange and systems integration.

For more on making EDI a reality:
- read this article at CIO Insight