B2B Data Integration and Transformation Blog

Last week, we shared with subscribers a fuller discussion around one of the five enduring lessons for the future of supply chain management post Covid-19 in Time To Fix What’s Broken. Where the previous installment in our series explored the pain and risks of relying on last century’s EDI and integration tools, this post will explain strategies and tools built for commerce in a century marked by sudden, sweeping disruption and changing demand patterns that demand agility and speed from companies who want to remain relevant.

Half a century ago, manufacturers could rely on a few certainties. For a start, their suppliers were fairly local. Second, their customers were close by, too. Today, that’s no longer the case; as a manufacturer, you know that your trading partners could be scattered across the globe.

The Challenge

This maker of building products for commercial and residential customers has been a Fortune 500 company for 65 consecutive years—and a REMEDI client since 1994. During that time, the client has relied on consultants from Columbus, Ohio-based EMEDI to manage, monitor, and maintain an EDI environment built on the IBM® Sterling Gentran: Server for Unix platform.