Elemica Solution Architect’s Insight Into The New Year
This is the third of my triptych relating to ‘Trends in 2014’. In my first one I discussed ‘Brands’. My second, ‘Data Quality’. In my third I am going to touch on a bit of an old chestnut. I can remember 12 years ago sitting in my London office laughing with a colleague about an article which had the title “EDI is Dead”. We had just got yet another request to connect to a customer via EDI and the article seemed to bear no relationship with real life. More than a decade later we still see whole industry sectors that still use the classic EDI standards and are very happy with it. However, much technology and the internet has made things easier, companies know that there is business knowledge in the EDI standards (and their XML children) which is embedded value.
More than a decade on, what will happen? Starting in 2014, I believe we will move from EDI to EDDY. Going back to the basics, EDI is the acronym for Electronic Data Interchange, interchange is an interesting use of words. It implies a singular hand-off from me to you. In reality it is the hand-off from one system to a second. This singular interchange of information feels slightly anachronistic in the days of Twitter and Facebook. Which is why I think it should move to EDDY, not necessarily the snappiest of acronyms, but I believe “Electronic Data Disseminated to You” is going to be an important area of consideration for 2014 and onwards.
What do I mean by that? Who is the “You” in EDDY. This for me is the important part of this, “You” should be anyone or any system that is connected by any electronic medium. So rather than feeding data into a single system, which is then interrogated at some point by multiple people, we should be passing data in parallel to many people in the value chain. Also, that data should be customized to the needs of the “You” that is receiving the data.
Let me give you an example. A ship notice that is coming from a supplier to a customer. Seems simple enough. The basic data is information about the shipment, with information on delivery date, volumes, product. At the moment, in the interchange model the ship notice would be delivered into an ERP system and that system would then kick-off work flows, or forwarding of information to other systems. How about I change the thinking, rather than a slow caterpillar of information creeping from system to system, I show you how a shimmering butterfly of information can cascade across multiple people and systems.
So, for that important raw material we will send the ship notice into the ERP system, to update the material on-hand so the system will calculate material needs better. How about at the same time I could send an email to accounts payable and the customers approver of the invoice saying that the shipment is coming against a certain purchase order and you need to approve the invoice so it can be paid efficiently. Then in parallel I send a text message to the receiver on the plant to say that the shipment is due and you do not have to worry about product not arriving. Equally I send a message into the Production Site security system saying that the delivery is going to be on a certain date and this is the number plate of the truck. I also send to the supplier confirmation that I have done all of this and I tell the logistics service provider that they are expected. So from one ship notice, I think I can do Electronic Data Dissemination to 7 different people and systems. All of them getting the bit of data they really need and improving the process.
This feels a bit like a dream, especially with current systems. If this was tried today it would kill typical middleware systems, it would have so many rules, so much orchestration, such a level of technical overhead that it would crush them. Which is why you need to change the dynamic, starting thinking in a different way. This was the challenge given to Arun Samuga, the Elemica VP of R&D in 2011. As he says himself “doing things the same as we had always done was not going to work, we had to strip it back to basics, when the team brainstormed they realized that it is all about universal norms, an order number is an order number regardless of what an EDI language wants to tag it as. So the Universal Business Concept was born”. As he has told me, when I have him in the headlock, the idea was the easy bit, implementing it was the hard bit. Our R&D team, working hand in hand with our development team have created the next generation of architecture.
I was brought up on Hillaire Belloc’s cautionary tales. Just because we now have the ability to disseminate, we have to be cautious. We don’t want to cause Data Obesity, so much data that it clogs the arteries and creates lethargy and inactivity. Most companies have designed out analysis paralysis, but I think an obesity epidemic is on the horizon, will we get data couch potatoes? The acronym EDDY was not necessarily an accident, think of it as a cautionary word. An eddy is a swirl of water in a flowing river, where too much water has created a spot that sucks you in. We need to ensure that EDDY does not become an eddy of data. So we should pull from normal activities, as much as we friend and unfriend people on Facebook, or manage our personal Twitter accounts you will want to manage the data dissemination. Of course you can send the data to the plant for every shipment, but surely you want to turn it on only for the product on allocation, or that can cause major plant disruption. The skill across 2014 and onwards will be creating controlled EDDY’s.
In conclusion, what am I saying across these three blogs? I think that as the economies get back into growth mode companies will want to do more with what they have already. Whether it is spreading the word of the quality of their brand, ensuring the quality of the data they have or getting data to the people that need it. This is not a seismic shift, I believe as we focus on building and shipping more physical goods companies will starting looking at improving things that mean those goods are sold better. It almost feels over the last few years we have gotten tied up in the technology (excuse the pun) and I think our mind has been “clouded”. I think this will be the year when we get back to the feel of “make good stuff and sell it efficiently; so you can be proud of who you are and what you sell”.