The Importance of Integration Planning in B2B EDI Supply Chain Projects – Part 1, An Overview

Preamble:

Before we discuss the importance of Integration Planning in B2B EDI Supply Chain Projects, let’s quickly review the information we provided in our previous series of blogs on, “The Ongoing relevance of EDI” or “Why EDI is still relevant”.

In the last series of posts, we discussed EDI from a historical perspective, the current state and the future use of EDI in supply chain, how EDI costs have significantly decreased over time and how the proper use of EDI has resulted in transformational business and process improvements in supply chain for all organizations that use it as part of their overall supply chain management infrastructure. These organizations have continued to substantially improve in a highly cost effective manner as their overall EDI operations have become entrenched as a core foundational component their supply chain Infrastructure.

That having been said, there is an important factor which is critical to using EDI optimally which must be considered – integration planning. Without properly planning how EDI will integrate across the supply chain, it is impossible to consider an implementation to be “Best-in-Class.” Over the next 4 posts, we will explore integration planning for B2B EDI supply chain initiatives including examining what optimal plans and processes should look like.

The Promise of Integration Planning:

The secret of achieving a highly successful supply chain operation is the achievement of “Collaborative End-to-End Visibility” and “Collaborative End-to-End Responsiveness.” This visibility and responsiveness cannot be achieved without effective integration planning. A well-integrated operation will result in a highly effective and responsive business operation, both from an execution and administrative perspective.

The benefit of a properly automated and integrated supply chain operation is the ability to involve and collaborate with customers and suppliers to:

These are only an example of key benefits - there are literally endless benefits that an organization and its trading communities achieve with a properly automated supply chain.

The key ingredient (and we would be inclined to say that the ONLY ingredient) that is absolutely mandatory for a highly effective supply chain is in integration planning and execution. Without a properly integrated supply chain, collaboration cannot occur. Without proper collaborative processes, an organization cannot have a meaningful nor effective operation to deal with its trading communities.

A BEST-In-CLASS Integration Plan:

In order to achieve highly collaborative supply chain processes that will provide end-to-end visibility and the desired responsiveness, one must remove/eliminate as many in-between and redundant processes from the supply chain. These unnecessary data points are the processes that have to do with but not limited to;

As we can see, there are many points to consider when embarking on an integration planning process for a B2B EDI supply chain initiative. In our next post, we’ll look at optimizing the process outline as well as what pre-integration and integration planning processes should look like.