I am a fan of the History Channel and one of my guilty pleasures is watching Swamp People. It is crazy to me how people want to hunt Alligators, an animal that can live up to a hundred years and grow to 13-15 feet long or longer. If you have never watched the show, the hunters put bait on a line to catch them and then they have to fight with them to get to a quarter sized kill shot and haul them in the boat. Most people struggle and fight with the 600 pound monsters until they can get to the kill spot. I saw a different approach on a recent episode. Liz and her daughter (the only female hunters on the show), started off pulling and tugging the line like every other time but this time the alligator was wrapped around the tree like dogs do with their leashes. The line was very close to snapping and they would have lost the prized alligator and $650. Liz decided she had to try a different approach and gave the alligator a whole lot of slack and waited for him to calm down. This surprised and confused the alligator and he decided to come up out of the water to look and see what happened out of curiosity. As soon as he surfaced, the fight was over.
You are probably wondering what this has to do with EDI……..
Well, it is simple. EDI can be the best thing for your company or your worst nightmare. When EDI is working well and there are no issues, your organization is efficient and probably more profitable than if you didn’t have EDI at all. When your system goes down or there are errors, often times there can be some big fines associated with incorrect or missing transactions. This usually results having management on a high alert and they want you to stop everything you are doing to get this fixed right away. Based on the high stress, your adrenaline is flowing and management has put you on the spot, now you have to perform. You jump into the software like most people and find the error and put in a hot fix to clear the error. Once it is up and running and the error clears, most people go back to their projects in process.
Often times the people supporting EDI are not developers so they don’t take the next necessary step in researching “WHY” the error occurred so it keeps happening. These problems can seem small and inconsequential at first but tend to occur more and more as time goes by. Then other errors occur and more hot fixes are applied. Now your system is so unstable that it is constantly crashing and more errors occur and fines increase. One of the hardest things for humans to face is when to ask for help or more expertise. Just like my analogy above when Liz let the slack out of the line to diagnose the situation and try a different approach to achieve her desired result. When an error occurs, it is ok to apply the hot fix to keep the system running, but you have to be able to diagnose and research why the issue occurred. If you don’t have the time, expertise, or resources to diagnose the errors, then it’s time to take another approach. REMEDI can help you look at the big picture and your system to recommend the best approach to eliminate the errors for the future.
What usually happens is that REMEDI gets the call when the system is crashing constantly and the client is in dire need. When one of our Developers takes a look at the system, the result usually ends up with it being better to clear the system out and start over because there are so many hot fixes in place with little to no documentation. The time it would take to reverse engineer the system would not be cost effective and take months to fix. Usually the errors are coming from your Trading Partners who upgrade their system and the formats have changed. The longer you keep older versions of your product and as time passes the more errors you will have. Clients have to continually invest in EDI to keep up with the latest upgrades, maintenance and renewals to keep the system running at the optimal performance. This not only keeps your EDI up to date with the rest of the world, but also is a retention tool for your employees because they are working with the newer technology and keeping their skills up to date.
The moral of my story is, when you have that Alligator on the line and you are in a stressful situation, how prepared are you to deal with it? When the situation is over, are you prepared and equipped to do the work necessary to improve your performance the next time the situation arises? EDI and Data Integration are the future and REMEDI will be glad to help you tame the Alligators of the world
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