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Your Opinions About Partnering With Your Trading Partners

worldpeaceLast week we asked about your experiences with EDI deployments in a 3 part survey. Which of the 3 parts you answered, depended on your position in the supply chain (Supplier, Buyer, or Software provider), but the questions were fairly similar. The reason for the segmentation was that we wanted to know more about what experiences diverged or transcended the differences in position... and you were clear about your opinions.

While we have not finished reviewing and analyzing the survey results, there are some very clear trends that have emerged even from a high level scan. The main issues faced across the board, are related to cooperation between trading partners in the setup and initial deployment of an EDI collaboration.

Of course, the oxymoron is right there... collaboration and lack of cooperation. At every level, it is evident that those implementations that go smoothly do so because trading partners and software/service providers communicate honestly and regularly, not only about expectations, but also about progress, stumbling blocks, issues to look out for, and all the nit-picky details that go toward establishing an intricate digital communication that needs to operate flawlessly on a day to day basis.

I'll hold back on the details till the next issue of this newsletter, but I've already given away the main plot. For those of you who participated in the survey, I thank you for your input. We received more detailed written responses about this one topic than we have for any other we've asked about. Over the next 2 weeks we will dig through the details of your replies, and provide you with a recap of the results, focusing on the specifics of what can and does go wrong with deployments.

By the way, we also asked about what went right with these implementations and it's no surprise that the answers precisely matched our expectations. The most frequently cited reasons for successful deployments had to do with trading partners having frequent and honest communications.

There's definitely a trend here. Unfortunately, I'm guessing the solution is much the same as the one that would bring about wold peace. But I also believe there is reason for optimism for collaboration between trading partners that have much the same motivations around the same goods and services.

If you have not yet, but would like to add your responses to this survey, we will keep it available for at least the next week. Just go here to add your comments.

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Scott Koegler

Scott Koegler is Executive Editor for PMG360. He is a technology writer and editor with 20+ years experience delivering high value content to readers and publishers. 

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