9 EDI Staffing Considerations for Your B2B Integration Initiatives

Posted by Brad Loetz on Apr 14, 2021 10:38 AM

9 EDI Staffing Considerations for Your B2B Integration Initiatives

While providing the integration capabilities to support an organization requires proper planning and a robust methodology, it's people that are truly vital to the successful execution of any initiative.

In B2B Integration Options, On-Premises, Hosted, Cloud, Hybrid, and More, we discussed 31 factors to consider for your delivery method, one of which was "Required Staffing." In this article, we expand on that concept and share 9 EDI staffing considerations for your B2B integration initiatives so you can achieve the best outcomes.

  1. Industry / Business Complexity: integrator level of industry experience and understanding of your firm
  2. Complexity of Trading Partner Requirements: integrator capability to communicate and process the complex to levels of partner expectations
  3. Types of Integration to be Supported: span of your integrators experience to support EDI, EAI, API, IOT requirements for example
  4. Workflow and Collaboration Capabilities: business process knowledge, process linkage and communication abilities
  5. Required Hardware and Infrastructure: ability to deploy and maintain integration “plumbing” to the level your chosen integration method requires
  6. Implementation, Development and Deployment: possession of skill sets to maintain your current method or take you in the direction of a new tool or integration delivery method
  7. Customer Experience: beyond tools, the integrators ability to communicate and positively represent your organization with trading partner integrators
  8. Upgrades, patches, maintenance, daily operation: possession of level of skill required to support your integration delivery method
  9. Vendor Relationships: integrator ability to manage these relationships, projects, and service level agreements

How you staff your integration team will vary greatly depending on your utilization of an on-premises, hosted, cloud, or hybrid approach. Regardless the delivery path you are on integration professionals will be involved.

As you review these people-based considerations, do you find you have the right integration professionals for your chosen integration mechanism? If you find no coverage gaps in the roles you need and the people you have in them versus your integration approach, you’re all set. If there are gaps, there may be some work to do as you reorganize or train existing personnel or create new roles and hire for them.

Here is a Remedi resource that outlines the key skills, traits, education and experience we look for in the EDI roles we represent (Analyst, Mapper, Developer, Architect), along with a description and list of responsibilities for each.

You can use it in job descriptions for your organization, your career, or determining the type of EDI staffing resource you need when you look outside the organization.

Here are a few other EDI Staffing resources for integrators that you might find valuable: