B2B Data Integration and Transformation Blog

Integration projects can be lengthy and require a lot of resources. When you’re planning an integration project, you not only have to consider the task at hand, but also the staff to complete the project. It does not mean that your employees can't carry it out on their own necessarily. Challenges often arise when employees are juggling several other mission-critical tasks.

When you think of the term “do-it-yourself project,” you might think that DIY means “do everything yourself.” But what if you do not have the skills, knowledge, or resources required? You might not do everything yourself, or might try, and this might leave the success of the project in jeopardy.  Health checks and integration system deployment audits often result from employee missteps that occurred at design and deployment time.

Remedi assists clients with many projects, issues, and routine maintenance. We thought we would take this opportunity to share one instance with you as we feel it’s information that can benefit our clients. In this project, we assisted a client with a project involving their Gentran Server Windows environment. The client updated their Windows operating system and that update caused the server hosting Gentran to stop booting. The underlying issue was a Windows Update issue and the client worked with Microsoft, but they could not resolve the Windows issue. Their EDI is the backbone of the business and they were in crisis mode.

You believe that generally, your company has the know-how and the experience to handle an integration project or move to a new integration tool, without bringing in a third party. However, you have discovered there are gaps in your staff’s knowledge. Training on your integration software suddenly becomes a necessity to bridge those gaps and to ensure that your project goes well.

It makes sense to tackle large projects in-house and culturally this approach is often the only way IT projects get completed in some organizations. These DIY situations might include bench marking your B2B integration capabilities or considering new integration delivery mechanisms. At times it sounds daunting to some firms, but it is doable.

However, just because you are taking the DIY approach does not mean you have to handle every single aspect of an initiative on your own. There are certain challenges that might arise which require outside help. Read on to learn when it makes sense to take on a B2B integration project on your own, when to ask for help, and to whom you should turn.