The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

One of the common data formats that we encounter today is XML.  This could be just plane XML, or any of the standardized versions; cXML, ebXML, etc.  But there are some basic commonalities between these.  And if you haven’t dealt with XML much, you will need to know something about it sooner or later.  This post is a brief introduction. (more…)

From time to time I am asked if I know where such and such standard can be found.  This is more than idle curiosity.  People are trying to integrate, or update integrations, and the standard documentation is not available or has been lost.  From the perspective of an integration engineer, such standards are more precious than gold.  I keep a collection of the standards that I have used over the years, (something that I recommend) but what I really encourage is for companies to publish their standards in a publicly accessible location.  Booknet Canada is an example of a company that has done this.  Lets take a look and see what it says….

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After you have created your usage specification, it can be useful to use a validation tool to check to verify that new trading partners comply during your boarding process. I have used Foresight’s EDI Analyzer for this many times, and it lets be quickly see where the EDI file departs from the specification.

There is a temptation to use this same validation in the production integration. But this would be a mistake. I’m not saying, “Don’t validate.” I highly encourage validation on both standard compliance and required data validation in mapping and integration. But to use the usage specification has a side effect that I witnessed once. (Only once.) (more…)

Sometimes we hear and then use industry jargon without having a clear definition of what they are.  I think all of us are guilty of this from time to time.  This post clarifies what a SKU is, and discusses how SKUs are used in the supply chain, and in EDI.

Definition:  SKU stands for “Stock keeping Unit” initially used for identifying items that a company keeps in stock so that they can track how many they have and such.  Now also used for services, and for contracts or warranties. (more…)

I have sitting on my desk, a very expensive book published by the ASC that contain the guidelines for the X12 3010 EDI standard.  I have rarely used them.  The EDI standards tool that I have used the most and can highly recommend is EDISIM from Foresight.  The last version that I used was version 5.0 and they are on version 6.8 as I write this post.  But for a long time, Foresight has nailed the conceptualisation of working with EDI standards.

One of the things that in invaluable is the ability to share your standard documentation both internally and externally.  EDISIM is a tool that has allowed me to do that.  They produce a very professional looking document for external consumption and the standard is exportable so that everyone using EDISIM can share the same standards file in a format called SEF.

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I was reading an article on Spend Matters, by Jason Busch, and I had an idea. Jason was writing about Twitter entering the B2B Mainstream. Now to be honest I had heard about Southwest’s proactive use of twitter to monitor and shape how their customer experience was being perceived.  And like many things with Southwest’s business, I find it to be touched with brilliance.  So as I read about it, I was suddenly struck with a much deeper way that twitter and twitter like technologies could be used. (more…)

As part of our series “EDI Primer” we are going to go over the various parts of EDI. EDI is neither truly delimited, nor fixed width.  EDI has some fixed position components, and uses delimiters in a different way than a truly delimited file.  This post it going to overview some facts about EDI and its parts in an introductory fashion.  If you are unfamiliar with EDI, you might want to start with the post, “What is EDI?”

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Want to get in the head of SAP CEO Leo Apotheker?  Charlie Rose does in this interview.

Leo answers a question from Charlie about what makes a software company successful.  Leo responds and explains that it is taking good ideas, and incorporating them in software.  He then goes on to explain that industry leaders like SAP are made by specializing in one line of business.  Companies that only have Enterprise software as one of their business lines will never achieve the same level of expertise.

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