Ok, before I go anywhere with this post I will admit the title is a bit corny. All I ask is to grant me a little leniency with the obvious cheese simply because it hit me like a “eureka” moment and there was no way I could pass up the opportunity.  Now that the pink elephant has been addressed, I can get into one of the topics that I am most passionate about within the EDI industry – integration of EDI into an organization’s ERP system. In order to truly reap the benefits of EDI, integration is not an option but rather a necessity. Any other configuration relegates an EDI relationship to not much more than an email or fax machine which is in direct opposition to the core purpose of EDI.

When Scott gave us a heads-up about this month’s topic- projects involving the connection of EDI translators to ERP systems, I thought I’d have a lot to contribute. However, as I thought about it, I realized there are several variations of that type of project, and that would limit my input since I hadn’t experienced all of them. I can make some generalizations, though based on what we went through.

Earlier this week I spoke with John Jackovin, CEO of Ontuet, (www.ontuet.net) a provider of data synchronization tools. Ontuet's tools address the needs of companies of varying sizes with a combination of tools that range from basic Excel spreadsheets for data collection and manual editing, to SaaS hosted applications with automated integration to backend processes.