Have you ever received the Friday afternoon call from an Account Manager that was so excited about landing that new account, only to learn that they promised said account that you would be ready to trade a full range of EDI documents by the end of the next week? What about the ever present spike of EDI translation failures when a Product Manager sets up that new item in your system, and decides that the asterisk just has to be in the product description? Someone that is not intimately tied to a company’s EDI process may be saying to themselves now “And….What’s the problem?”, but these occurrences can indeed wreak havoc on your EDI operations. In my time in the EDI world I have found that no matter what industry you are in, or applications you are using, these five situations will always drive you mad.

Only a couple weeks ago,  as I was looking at my calendar to schedule yet another meeting I realized that it was December! While I have looked at that same calendar a thousand times throughout the year, it never really sank in until that moment how fast 2012 has gone. Being heads down in project after project at work, while balancing getting the kids to every soccer practice and dance lesson on time at home, it becomes very easy to fall into a day to day routine of simply getting the next task done.

One of the most ubiquitous tenets presented in just about every marketing class ever given is the four P’s of marketing, which are price, promotion, product, and placement.   You may be asking yourself now what this has to do with your e-commerce operations, but if we change our perspective slightly on the function of the department within the organization, we can see that the product and placement tags directly apply.