At one point during my career, I worked on building, parsing, and transmitting Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) files daily, mostly for the healthcare industry. Recently, I had the opportunity to help a manufacturing company create and send EDI to their shipping/fulfillment provider and receive EDI back to update their order processing system.
Prior to implementing EDI, the manufacturer would receive orders from an ASP.NET-based web site into their Dynamics CRM Online instance. A workflow in CRM would then create a packing list and send the information as an e-mail message to the shipping company.
As you might expect, the shipping company had to open the e-mail and manually re-type the order details into their system so that the warehouse could pick the items from the shelves and ship them out. This led to high costs for the manufacturer, the possibility of mistyped information, and order fulfillment delays.
In addition to the high costs incurred by the manufacturer and the other problems with manual intervention of the ordering process, the company is experiencing rapid growth in sales. Although this is great news, especially in the current economic climate, their rapid growth also meant that the order fulfillment process had even more risk of breaking down.
Like a lot of companies in the manufacturing and shipping industries, beginning in the mid-1960s, the shipping company used by our client (the product manufacturer) supports EDI for receiving shipment requests and sending back shipment details. With the rapid growth of our client, it made perfect sense to move to an EDI-based solution.
The diagrams to follow show the ordering and fulfillment process before and after Altriva helped our client improve the process.
Altriva and our client had many reasons to choose Windows Azure for the platform to host the EDI-processing application. First, as I mentioned previously, our client’s sales are growing at such a rate that we needed a platform that can scale-up quickly. Azure provides fast and easy scalability. Next, the application needs to run reliably 24x7x365 and Azure has proven to provide excellent reliability. Finally, since our client already subscribes to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and other Microsoft services, they receive a single billing statement for their use of Windows Azure as well.
On the surface, combining “EDI” and “Windows Azure” in the same sentence seems preposterous, but in practice the two can work together quite well. Maybe next I’ll get to work on a project that combines EBCDIC and Microsoft LightSwitch! Or maybe not.