Overview

In this time of increasing financial, operational and regulatory pressures on businesses and their trading partners, executives are discovering that electronic transactions present as many challenges as they do opportunities. Companies implement electronic transaction strategies in order to achieve the highest possible levels of automation, however, as almost everyone has discovered, many backend processes and systems have very specific data content and format requirements making the exchange of data difficult.

Standards such as X12, EDIFACT and even proprietary file formats must be supported, given the wide variety of trading partner requirements. All these requirements have created a number of questions that organization leadership should address to be responsive to their markets. The answers to these questions can determine whether an organization can create and maintain a strategic advantage leveraging electronic trading relationships.

Key Transaction-Related Questions for Organizations

• What tools can I use to ensure that the data is compliant with my business specific requirements, and those of my trading partners?
• Do I need different software systems for different standards such as X12, EDIFACT, and legacy file formats?
• How will I manage, enforce, or relax edits and errors, based upon the different needs of my trading partners?
• Different types of submitters need to send different types of data in the transactions. How will I manage to ensure that I receive this data when I need it?
• How can I split and route transactions once they hit my firewall — to the right adjudication system, to a carve-out vendor, or even to separate good transactions from bad transactions?
• How will I generate the appropriate acknowledgments and error messages when bad transactions are received?
• How will I keep up with the standards and code sets as they change and evolve and with new standards as they are implemented?
• How can I serve up this EDI data for new value-added applications in my organization without a huge amount of translator maintenance and cost?