Peter,
To offer an additional dimension to Ron and your thoughts about the use of
Universal
Data Model datafiles, in our
EDI translator we use a UDM data file
for each type of business document because the information that just one
Trading Partner sends and receives to/from its other Trading Partners, just
in one type of document, may be quite different - eg. a food supplier to
Kroger and Wal-mart sends/receives both grocery and retail
purchase orders
and invoices containing information of many different types and formats,
plus individual Trading Partners often have their own specific information
requirements.
On the in-house side of the translator, the UDM document also enables us to
build individual
API's for each document type to interface with different
back-end software products on different databases and configured differently
due to customization by individual Trading Partners.
So, the UDM is truly a universal data store that provides common data
structures for interfacing with all EDI maps and most backend software
products on most databases.
This actually simplifies the software interfaces and thereby ensures the
reliability of the translation of information between the Trading Partners.
Just a thought,
Dave
Dave Taylor
President
Sysmark Information Systems, Inc.
49 Aspen Way
Rolling Hills Estates, CA 90274
800-SYSMARK (800-797-6275)
(O) 310-544-1974
(C) 310-561-5200
(P) 800-339-1497
(F) 310-377-3550
Your Source for Integrated EDI Translation and DataSync Integration
www.sysmarkinfo.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Peter" <
To: <
Sent: Thursday, March 09, 2006 2:30 PM
Subject: [SPAM] Re: [
EDI-L] From webMethods to GIS: A Painful Odyssey
> Like an earlier poster my experience with Web Methods
> (WM's) has fallen far short of satisfactory. I find
> this double translation 850 to UDM and UDM to IDOC to
> be unnecessary and fraught with complications. In our
> case the WM's folks are a different group than the SAP
> or EDI folks. So there is a lot of added confusion to
> the process. And Web Methods performance/uptime has
> been atrocious even on the scale of GIS.
>
> Back to your question though, say a PO comes in from
> Krogers. Assuming they are sending different ISA/GS
> IDs (one for your company one for the acquisition
> company) you could use the ID's that come in through
> Process Data (which is the meta-data for that file)
> and use a Choice Start/End node in your BP to route
> data to the correct destination. Map it how you want,
> idoc, XML, etc. If the ISA/GS ID isn't different, you
> could add an UPDATE Process Data rule in your map to
> update Process Data with the N1-04 or some other field
> that differentiates the two. When the Acquisition is
> complete you remove or disable the choice start.
>
> On your example about changing versions of Walmart
> docs, the savvy mapper knows to deal with the
> individual
segments that may have changed and not
> rewrite the whole map. By activating/inserting a few
> more segments, your map is updated, voila. Just a few
> hours, not weeks.
>
> The whole UDM thing seems clever in powerpoint
> diagrams but experience with WM's has been negative.
> And I'm no GIS cheerleader, they've made a lot of
> progress with it, but some parts just seem
> fundamentally flawed. Especially if your company just
> needs EDI functionality.
>
> On a side note, does anyone else wish for the days of
> applications written in C, C++, or even VC++. These
> Java based apps like GIS, WM's, Cyclone, are dogs by
> comparison. Slow and unreliable. Maybe not fair to
> blame it on the language, but still can't help but
> notice an obvious decline in the quality of
> 'enterprise' apps the same time Java became popular.
>
> -Peter
>
> --- Ron Paquin < wrote:
>
> > Third week on the new job and though I would have
> > denied the
> > possibility, I find myself missing webMethods.
> >
> > Specifically, in EDI in webMethods, we used an
> > approach involving so-
> > called canonical documents (also known as Common
> > Business Document or
> > Universal Data Model).
> >
> > For example, and inbound X12 4010 850 was first
> > translated into a
> > Purchase Order Canonical, and then that Purchase
> > Order Canonical was
> > translated into an SAP 31i IDOC.
> >
> > Why? A number of reasons. From the Purchase Order
> > Canonical, we could
> > easily translate into any back end system. For
> > example, Kroger sent
> > us POs for our core business, but also for an
> > acquisition that had
> > not been integrated into SAP. So the X12 850, for
> > either destination,
> > was translated into the PO Canonical, and from there
> > the core stuff
> > was translated into IDOCs, and the other stuff
> > translated into XML
> > and from there, via an XLST, into a PDF to be
> > emailed to the
> > acquisition folks. Now, once the acquisition is
> > integrated into SAP,
> > our only change will be to use the same path to the
> > IDOC that we do
> > for the core stuff--literally, a five minute change.
> >
> > Another example. We initially implemented Wal-Mart
> > at 4030, but
> > they've recently mandated upgrading in 5010. In any
> > X12-to-IDOC
> > translation, this would require recreating all of
> > their maps in the
> > new version--several weeks' work. In wM using this
> > approach, however,
> > it was simply a matter of changing the schema in the
> > existing map
> > from 4030 to 5010 and repointing the mappings--a
> > single afternoon's
> > work.
> >
> > I'm probably preaching to the choir, if anyone
> > reading this is
> > familiar with webMethods and their GEAR
> > documentation. There's a
> > White Paper called "Canonical Strategy" that you're
> > probably familiar
> > with.
> >
> > At any rate, what I'm looking for is some blessed
> > person who has gone
> > from webMethods TO GIS, and who can point me in the
> > direction of how
> > the heck I replicate this functionality in GIS.
> >
> > Anyone?
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Ron Paquin
> > Tenneco Inc.
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
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