EDI Service Offerings

Charter Solutions, Inc. has been providing EDI Consulting services since our origin over 11 years ago.  We have a long history of successful EDI Assessments, Partner Enablement, Implementations, and Business Process Audit and Redesign projects.

The following is a list of Charter Solutions’ EDI-related service offerings.  Please contact us to learn more about how we can help you drive EDI business productivity today!

• Implementation Assistance – Interested in receiving the benefits of doing business via EDI transaction, but not sure how to proceed? Let us help from the selection of a tool that fits within your budget to leading your company through the entire implementation cycle and support of this significant new component of your operations.

 

• System Audit and Redesign - As an organization evolves, an EDI system often falls behind in the path of progressing technology. Our analysts help provide an experienced eye to spot where your system can be tweaked for increased efficiency and accuracy, as well as improving the structure and stability of the application. Depending on your EDI app, there's a good chance we can make significant improvements in your daily processing

 

• Trading Partner Enablement - Let us do all of the work to implement one, ten, a hundred or a thousand of your customers or suppliers. This service takes the worry and work out of bringing new trading partners electronic with you.

 

• Implementation Assistance- Bringing a new ERP package, VMI or WMS system up in a new environment can be very difficult, especially when communicating electronically with the outside world. Our consultants can perform data integration, gap analyses, and many other tasks to make sure that when you flip the switch, everything comes live together.

 

• Training - We provide varying depths of training for EDI application systems, mapping tools, and even on your particular environment. This can be a great way to bring new employees up to speed in your environment or EDI system, as well as just refresh your knowledge on the tool you have been using for years. We often find that we open doors for new uses of the tools that had not been considered before, including better audit trails and error tracking.

 

• EDI Migration - As the EDI environment in many industries matures, a company's EDI subsystem requirements often change. In some cases, a system redesign can refocus a company's systems, but in other cases migrating EDI systems becomes the only option.  Our migration methodology serves as a great process structure to migrate between EDI tools, or even versions of the same tool.

 

• Documentation - Using organized templates, we offer varied levels of documentation for your current production system, from basic data flow and schedule documentation to the documentation of standard maps and trading partner contacts. In-depth documentation is often most useful when migrating between EDI software packages or ERP systems.

 

• EDI Outsourcing- As your company’s business environment becomes more competitive, increasing employee productivity is a key way to maintain and improve margins.  Outsourcing your EDI operations and support to Charter Solutions gives you the flexibility to reassign your knowledgeable employees to other value-added initiatives while reducing the total cost of your EDI operations. Charter’s combination of expertise and skill at improving EDI operating environments, with experience in managing 24X7 support structures, allowing you to benefit from our strengths and avoid weaknesses in the chain. Call us today to discuss our architecture and see how we can make a difference in your business today!!
  

 

Reference EDI Projects

Charter Solutions has completed numerous projects in the Twin Cities area in our eleven year history, a few of which are listed below.   We have many more examples that can be provided if necessary.

 

EDI Audit for Global Manufacturing Company

Charter Solutions performed an EDI Audit October of 2007, concentrating primarily on the order to cash flows for this global manufacturing company.  Charter’s investigative approach included reviews of the technology currently in place, as well as facilitated sessions and interviews with stake holders and functional team members.  The results of this audit very clearly identified the problem areas for the client.  Charter Solutions produced a project roadmap that systematically addressed each of the problem areas via a series of projects in three major phases.  These projects tackled the largest technical and process issues facing the client’s order to cash flow cycle, but the benefits of each project extended beyond the order to cash flow and paved the way for new initiatives, including Data Sync and supply chain integration.  Charter also identified areas of the client’s business process that were not SOX compliant and developed a solution to address them.

 

Implementation of Sterling GIS to Replace Gentran

Charter Solutions augmented the client’s current support staff and supported production while the company undertook a major ERP implementation and upgrade from Gentran to GIS.  Charter Solutions also played a lead role in the planning and implementation of GIS, including the development of the overall architecture and the conversion of maps from the current EDI environment to GIS.  As part of this implementation, Charter Solutions facilitated sessions with the business and technical teams for problematic transactions including the inbound 820 remittance advice integration with data store, and multiple 856 advance ship notice structures from internal and external warehouses.  This implementation involved XML, flat file and direct database integration via JDBC connectivity. 

 

Implementation of EDI with SAP

For this client, Charter Solutions entered their SAP implementation in the final three scheduled months after the initial EDI implementation efforts failed.  The Charter Solutions EDI implementation team stepped in, and through data analysis and thorough project management, implemented an internal translation solution involving over 200 partners and 10 transactions.  Throughout this implementation Charter Solutions provided regular status updates with a dashboard view of the project.  One of the dashboard features was notification of potential threats to the successful completion and this feature was used to identify and mitigate those threats.

 

Acquisitions with EDI Impact, Gentran UNIX

Charter Solutions was asked to maintain the EDI subsystem, Gentran for UNIX, of an acquired company.  For this project, Charter Solutions implemented an additional Gentran environment to migrate the data from the division acquired by the customer.  Although the business model was completely different than was currently in production, the cutover went seamlessly, and the production environment was supported for 2 years.  At that time Charter Solutions managed the EDI portion of a conversion to the company’s primary ERP package from the disparate package on which the acquisition operated on previously.