As with many “legacy” applications built up and customized over many years, adding new features can be very daunting.  Ameriwood Industries utilized EDI very heavily, but adding new Trading Partners to their customized systems began to take too long and became a risky experience. 
 
As a first step, Ameriwood chose to use a standardized EDI solution from SPS Commerce called Retail Standard XML (RSX).  Although this helped eliminate specific Trading Partner customizations, it was still going to be a large effort to retrofit their existing systems.  And, management wanted to make sure that their current highly customized solution would not just be replaced with a newer highly customized solution.
 
JDB was brought in to analyze the current environment and develop a solution that would allow as much standardization as possible, but still be flexible enough to handle the inevitable special cases.  While performing the analysis it was found that there were over 4000 hard-coded customizations among hundreds of programs.  JDB developed an approach to eliminate unnecessary hard-coding, standardize data imports/exports, and categorize and document non-standard business logic.  A full system design was created and programming and implementation was executed.  The resulting system allows Trading Partners to be added in hours or days, not the weeks or months it was requiring.
 
Highlights of the system include:

• Full Trading Partner/EDI set up and configuration
• Rules-based data updates
• Complete data migration tool
• Built-in archiving and purging
• End-to-end reporting

This system simplified EDI maintenance, allowed quicker implementation of Trading Partners (which means a better bottom line), reduced the dependence on a handful of programmers, and minimized organizational risk