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Step 6 - Establishing a B2B EDI Pilot Project with Selected Trading Partners

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 not only enables refinement of the organization's system, but 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 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. First transmitting documents to the pilot partners for evaluation of the transmissions and once the pilots verify they can process the data accurately, returning 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. After reaching that agreement, trading partners coordinate a timeline for phasing out paper transactions in parallel, dependent upon the complexity of the EDI system. This timeline can range from several weeks to several months.

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 setup to handle anticipated traffic?
• Will internal EDI users find results satisfactory?

With some companies, the pilot phase of EDI never really ends, remaining 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.