Step 6—Establishing a B2B EDI Pilot Project
Upon completion of development and testing of the EDI system, it is critical that additional system tests be conducted in pilot with specific trading partners. This enables refinement of the organization’s system; if all goes well, it also delivers a first look at how EDI will impact efficiency. The pilot project should be initiated with a small number of trading partners, preferably those with EDI experience. In order to be successful, one primary EDI application – such as purchase orders – should be the target of the pilot.
In practice, limited testing of the system already will have been completed. When VANs connect organizations to their systems, they also conduct tests. Companies transmit data to the VANs who then verify that transmissions are reliable. Pilot partners execute a similar series of events. Documents are transmitted to pilot partners for evaluation. After the pilots verify they can process the data accurately, they return the data for testing.
Upon successful completion of these tests, pilots send for real orders on real schedules to assess whether the system can respond to daily processes. Once both trading partners are completely satisfied that performance of the EDI system meets or exceeds existing process performance, paper transactions can be eliminated. Trading partners coordinate a timeline for phasing out paper transactions in parallel. This timeline can range from several weeks to several months depending on the complexity of the EDI system.
Results from the pilot project must be analyzed internally to answer the following questions:
- Will the EDI system maintain control over data transactions?
- Do the benefits projected in the original EDI study appear to be provided by the EDI system?
- Will the EDI system be set up to handle anticipated traffic?
- Will internal EDI users find results satisfactory?
With some companies, the pilot phase of EDI never really ends. It remains an isolated system that handles only high-volume trading partners rather than moving into a broader base of trading partners. Extending EDI capabilities to smaller trading partners is the final step of EDI implementation.