Just seeing what other folks are doing for EDI. We have a customer request that is looking to send an order file to us during the day and we would process it.
Right now we are manually entering the orders, but looking to automate this. Would DMT be the best tool to do this? At first glance I thought so, but am struggling with knowing how DMT would handle multiple lines and releases. If this is a DMT solution, how does one maintain this. I can see this request being used for other customers.
Other things that are needed.
Notify the customer/inside sales when the load fails.
Notify the customer/inside sales when a new order is created.
Manage Order Changes.
Hearing what others are doing would be great. We don’t own Service Connect. But if we need to code a solution around DMT, Service Connect might be worth it.
I think DMT has a “Combines Sales Order” import, one that can handle creating an order, creating the lines, and updated the releases all in one DMT.
We had this exact example of a problem, and we originally went with the EDI module of service connect. Originally we liked it, but we soon noticed that service connect was very very slow with orders. It could take well over an hour to process 40+ orders and that was with an optimized service connect workflow that we had the experts look at. So, long story short we decided to create our own Microsoft service that monitors a folder and allows us to drop the data file and it processes the orders in under a second now. It will even create the customer if they do not exist. This is an example where a custom solution does cost some upfront, but for what we were going to pay in support for service connect, we got a heck of a deal. Let me know if you are interested and I’ll send you the contact of the person!
We will want to start with one customer, about 20 orders a day. We are using the DMT, just there are columns that the customer will not have, or care to fill out. Aaron, I would be interested to learn about the route you all took. Did you do an ROI and what not with EDI?
We evaluated all options and the service connect route was a good way to determine that we didn’t want to invest in it long term. The support contract alone for 1 year was already way too much. So we determined that a custom solution was better. For about half the cost of the support contract we got a custom solution that is far better, in my opinion, then service connect as a solution. Basically it still uses Epicors BO’s, so no worry on how the data is inputed. The nice thing is that is also has an incredibly low footprint. Like 20 MB running memory space and a super small install. Under 50MB. So you could run this on a very basic server, or even a simple machine if you wanted too. We had an ROI of 4.5 months with this route, which we could justify very much so. We already had the service connect module, so that wasn’t equated in, but if that was the case you’d see an ROI in probably like 1-2 months I bet since that has a huge footprint of cost.
If you’d really like to go indepth, Ken, like numbers, technologies used, budgets etc., lets carry this conversation in email as I don’t want to be blasting the forum with budget figures and what not. Would love to help you guys, as I know Epicor can tend to be a much more expensive route, especially when you are just wanting to do this on a one customer scale at the moment.
We created four different .NET programs that import various spreadsheets; they can create new orders or add new lines to existing orders or add new releases to existing lines; we also capture any price, revision, quantity or date changes too and write out the from/to in a UD table and then a dashboard shows what changed.
The .Net approach is a great one. We host everything here locally so it was easy for us to just make a server service file, but I am a huge fan of .Net programs. We got a couple of them doing some things for us. I am about to write up a big article on my journey intergrating and connected our E10 ERP with a Woocommerce site. It was quite a journey.
It may need to have someone combine the files from separate emails/customers and give it a once over (adding some required fields) then submit it to DMT but it could be done for that kind of volume. The customer wouldn’t need to give you more than the Part# & Qty really for the required columns.
DMT Sales Order Combined required columns are pretty predictable: Company, OrderNum, CustomerCustID, OrderDtl#OrderLine, OrderDtl#PartNum, OrderDtl#LineDesc, OrderDtl#SellingQuantity, OrderRel#OrderRelNum
If you have someone who can code C# then a custom program may be a good route otherwise it could be harder to update/troubleshoot if something goes wrong or as business needs change.
I’ve used SSIS instead of Service Connect to do some automation in this respect. SSIS is included in SQL Server, and most of it is drag and drop. The left image is the workflow, the right image is the detail behind the “Process File to Create Output” task. You can do anything you need to in terms of adding columns, looking up data, summarising.
You can see I’m then calling DMT to get the data into Epicor. I run it twice, because after running it the first time it doesn’t update all fields correctly. Running it second time resolves – I need to revisit this at some point, I’m sure that reordering the columns should mean it loads correctly 1st time.