The Integration Engineer
When it just has to work.

Not to be masochistic, but among friends and neighbours a common topic of conversation between men is our occupations. “What do you do?” is a common question and conversation starter.  As we all know, sometimes it is difficult to explain what we do to those outside of our business.  There are people that I have known for years that still don’t really understand what it is that I do at work. (more…)

I remember a day when we had a problem with our order processing.  When we finally figured out what was wrong, there were a few embarrassed people.  We had introduced some new monitoring to the system, but had done so in such a way that we added a point of failure to the ordering process.

This was and is a bad thing.  And it can be avoided easily by making sure that you use a passive monitoring system.  By its very nature the state of a passive system has no impact on the system being monitored. (more…)

“So, how long will that take?”  Is a question that some of us have grown to hate.  And it seems that it is a question, that in various forms, we are asked daily.  (If not more frequently)  And if you have been doing this for any time, you have probably come up with a way to answer these questions.  There was a time when I started answering this question with a standard answer of, “2 weeks.”  And let me explain why.

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Its time for another mapping exercise.  This time we will receive an EDI 832 in 4010 format, and map the data to a DB or flat file.  Getting catalog data into your procurement system is an important task.  And creating  variety of mapping exercises provides us with a better understanding of how mapping projects work than just having one that tries to be everything.  And mapping is one of the fun things that we get to do.  Following this exercise we will have worked through the the common issues and demonstrated how this process comes together.

Mapping Steps

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