Well, guess what – I was reading (go figure!) a newsletter from another site – E-Commerce Best Practices (ec-bp) – and they had an article – that itself – was excerpted from the EDI ACADEMY – all about “EDI to FAX and FAX to EDI” types of communications. And it got Me to thinking. Yes, again.

One of the things that I’ve always had and dealt with in the past with My own EDI program for My employer.. First off, we have our own in-house solution for EDI. We use the Inovis TrustedLink i-Series program – and have for years – and pull directly from our merchandising system on our AS/400 – sorry – Series-i system. We populate back into that merchandising system (Island Pacific) and also our WM system from the inbound ASN documents. And with the new 810 Invoice that I’m working with our accounting department on, I’ll populate from that document, too.

But, again, in the beginning, there was the expansion of our program – trying to net as many of our vendors and suppliers and getting them on-the-hook and in-the-basket for EDI document trading. Now, it should be said that of our 1700-plus vendor rolls, there are some duplications – in that this product line from Big Vendor A is set up differently in our merchandising system than some other product line from the same vendor. What this means, is that I may have multiple vendor numbers assigned to a single trading partner – all based upon a product line or a division. Apparel is different from footwear which is different from hard-goods which is different from cleated shoes which is different from winter snow-wear and .. well, you get the idea.

Then, of course, there are still entries for vendors that we may not be currently doing business with – but we’ve dealt with in the past – and there is a chance (no matter how slight!) that we may just buy from them in the future. So they’re in that 1700-plus listing. Add to this, the “factors” and remit-to entries for all of these vendors, if it’s different form the “main” vendor set-up. In cases of the multiple vendor numbers (as described above) we may have them all pointing back to a single vendor number – the remit to – that we never buy from, but all the checks are sent to for invoices.

And then there are the SMBs – the Small and Medium Businesses – that we buy from. The small mom & pop company that makes the best darn badminton shuttle-cock in the world.. now I’m wondering if I spelled that right. Anyway. They make the best dang _____ in the world – and that’s ALL that they make – and we buy it from them a few times a year in some decent quantities.

Or there’s the case of the one-woman show that we order some cooling necktie bandanna kind of things from – she runs the entire operation with a part-time receptionist/secretary, but takes care of all sales and marketing and manufacturing aspects and dealings all by herself.

These are the kind of small and medium businesses that need a super low cost solution for EDI – these are the kinds of businesses that rely upon something as “un-EDI” as the concept of EDI to FAX and FAX to EDI. And sure, there are often just as inexpensive web-based EDI solutions out there – but these small business owners don’t have the time or the inclination to learn the system. Or they don’t like to get on the net – because they only use it for e-mail and even then it’s through dial-up and it’s slow, but it’s simple.

At the beginning of our EDI expansion a few years ago, it was VERY IMPORTANT that we have some kind of solution for the (very-possibly) less than tech-savvy vendors – that solution for the small guy that only has one computer and doesn’t have the time or inclination to get online to find out “you’ve got orders!” Our provider (remember, Inovis) – well, at that time, they were still QRS – worked on and created a great fax based EDI system for use with these vendors and trading partners. When Inovis took over QRS, they sold off the solution – called MEC (Managed ECommerce) to ICC, who now handles those clients.

A while back on the EDI-L Yahoo! Group, I was involved in a discussion of “what is considered EDI” (don’t remember how long ago and didn’t feel like searching through the old posts to find it), and I commented on how these kinds of documents are still considered EDI. And even being able to find a way to e-mail an order – or whatever documents you’re trading – is still EDI. EDI is Electronic Data Interchange, right? And isn’t, at the MOST basic level, an e-mail or a fax a type of EDI..? We’re sending data, right? It is being done in an electronic format, right? Just as we can trace back the data we’re sending – no matter how sophisticated – back to those 1s and 0s (ones and zeros), we can also trace these back to tones and blips and beeps that are sent over a phone line. Is this an overly simplistic explanation of it? Sure, but so is how I liken “EDI document trading” to “e-mail sending” to those less-than-tech people I deal with in other departments.

Even though many of us are pretty technical in our abilities and our ways of thinking, we need to also remember those that are not that technical. Yet they’re also people that are extremely important in the grander scheme of the WHY we’re doing EDI. They’re the buyers that create the orders. They’re the small mom-n-pop companies that make the product we buy and ship it. They’re the former nurses that work in the records room that send your medical history to the new hospital. They’re the math and accounting bean-counting pros that pay the bills and keep the ship afloat on the financial seas.

Even though we’re looking at EDI to FAX and thinking “how quaint, how archaic”, we have to remember all those other eyes out there that will be looking at and working with the data and the documents we trade without our knowledge and our tech-savvy.