I’m sure all of you have heard of both the success and failure of companies outsourcing their EDI development and support to offshore IT consulting firms.
REMEDI has been involved with several customers that have decided to take this path. The plan was to have consultants from the offshore company come to the United States to get trained for 6-8 weeks, return to their country, and within a few weeks be able to take over the EDI department.
Unfortunately, they have all failed, and these were not small failures. We are talking huge companies.
It seems to me that companies have failed to understand the importance of the business knowledge that EDI resources possess. I have always said that EDI is 20% technical and 80% business. EDI is technically quite easy. It is the business knowledge of how the data is used and what the data means and the interaction with your trading partner to get the right data that is most important. How can this be trained in two months?
