🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <phrE5x9uD.2yD@netcom.com>, Paul Rubin <phr@netcom.com> wrote:

>In article <E5wM2y.2E0@world.std.com>,
>Joseph H Allen <jhallen@world.std.com> wrote:

>The thing is, EDI just doesn't benefit smaller companies that much.
>The people who really gain from EDI are the ones who have to deal with
>a -lot- of different trading partners, and that means the "mob bosses".
>The smaller companies who trade with them just consider EDI to be a
>nuisance and wouldn't bother with it even it were free, if their
>larger partners didn't insist on it.

Absolutely.

>The only reason I see for doing free EDI is to make it easier (cheaper)
>for small companies to trade with large EDI users.  The large users
>are using existing standards and won't be interested in changing to new ones.

Right. So making it cheaper means less expensive software to do:
- envelope wrappers (ISA, GS, ST, etc segments and associated cruft)
- standards verification (are required fields all filled? are there
  strings in fields defined in the spec as integers?
- interface with local databases' import/export facilities (known as mapping)
- automatic authentication sending (for received docs)
- automatic authentication reconciliation (for sent docs)
- auditing
- interface with the communications subsystem (internet or something else)
  
>The EDI standards are all quite similar in
>structure although the terminology varies (EDIFACT calls "sentences"
>what X12 calls "segments" if I remember properly).

"The thing I like about standards is that there are so many to choose from"

Even within one subset of the standards (X12) there are multiple
variants (3020, 3030, 3030VICS, 3040, and many many others). And even
using the same standard, two different partners can exploit loopholes
to do the same doc in significantly different ways (those who use the
SDQ record versus those who don't, for example).

>I wrote a generic translator; it wasn't that complicated.

Heh. Look at Sterling's Mentor. Five digits to buy, won't run on
character terminals and incredibly complex.

>The one thing that didn't fit into
>the generic framework was the X12 HL segment, a kind of recursive bill
>of lading that nobody actually used or understood as far as I could
>tell, but we had to support it because it was in the standard, so I
>put a special hack into the translator for it.

The HL is not the bill of lading itself (that's the ASN). But it is the
component that makes the ASN the monster of all retail EDI documents.

(That is, of course, if you discount POs and invoices that use SDQs ;-)

-- 
  Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
 Supporting PC-based Unix since 1985 / Caldera & SCO authorized / www.telly.org
 Trains stop at train stations. Buses stop at bus stations. I use a workstation.