Our first survey asked you What Goes Wrong in an EDI Implementation. 2/3 of you reported (unsurprisingly) that you did experience problems during at least one implementation. Here are the categories you mentioned. It's easy to see that "Compliance with trading partner requests" topped the list of issues.
Our next survey asked you about developing Analytics from EDI data. This has become an increasingly hot trend since the beginning of the year. While 67% of you reported being aware of the ability to use EDI data to perform analytics, nearly 60% said they were not working with a provider that offered the capability to deliver analytics from their EDI data.
Our next query asked about successful and unsuccessful EDI implementations, and was segmented based on your company's role. Here are the survey results for the question "What part of your implementation WAS SUCCESSFUL, and went exactly as it should have?"for each of the 3 types of organizations.
Suppliers
Customers
Software and Service Providers
We then asked you about your plans for considering a change to your software or service provider. Interestingly, only 60% of you said you would consider changing if your current provider went out of business. But when asked what would motivate you to actively seek a different provider, better pricing was at the top of the chart.
We then wanted to get a better understanding of your trading partner relations. Very few of you said the number of trading partners you were working with had decreased in the last year, while the majority of you said your trading partner count was increasing.
We then looked into the long-standing debate about EDI and XML. Nearly 1/2 of you said that you used both EDI X12 and XML formats within your organizations. But you also overwhelmingly said that if you had to choose a single data format for trading, that format would be EDI.
X12 versions continue to change, and keeping up with the changes can be a challenge. We asked you which versions you were currently supporting. The data doesn't make a very pretty chart, because of the variety of responses. But 100%y of you said you supported older versions including 4010 and 4030. while only 15% indicated you supported 5010 and 6010 versions
We then asked about your use of POS data, or 852 transaction sets. 70% of you said that you collect and use P.O.S. data from your customers. As for analyzing that mountain of data, most of you dais you use either internally developed applications or spreadsheets.
And our last survey of 2010 asked about your plans for expanding your EDI automation downstream - in other words, including your own suppliers (assuming you were not a retailer). 40% of you indicated you were not considering asking your suppliers to automate their trading practices with you, while some of you went as far as indicating you were considering mandating EDI implementations with your suppliers.
The results of these surveys have been enlightening to us, and are shaping our editorial content for this year. If you have comments, or would like to have us include a particular survey in the coming year, let us know your thoughts.
