In most cases, it is probably fair to say that these and more factors are at work in varying degrees and in varying stages at every company that uses EDI.

However, one constant that never seems to change is the resilience of the EDI professionals that do understand the criticality of the processes they manage, and their ability to get the important things done so that the business of their companies can go on seamlessly.

Lowell Porter, EDI Coordinator with H.D.Smith, a national healthcare products supplier based in Springfield, IL. joined the company 8 years ago without a clue about electronic data interchange. "When we started using EDI, the company was doing less than $500 million per year in sales and I was tasked with handling the EDI processes. Today, we are doing $3.5 billion and growing," says Porter. "Earlier this year our volume started to increase significantly and I asked for help in order to keep up."

Porter's senior management was reluctant to simply hire additional staff, so they asked him to find out what the industry norms were for his kind of environment. Porter turned to his colleagues in other companies to find out what their staffing levels were, and if there were any correlation with company size, transaction volume, or number of B2B trading partners.

The most common measure is the number of trading partners, "the number of transaction types and number of transactions comes into play in the calculation, but there is so much variation from one company to the next that it's nearly impossible to compare them," according to Porter.

In his initial research, Porter came across many different kinds of EDI implementations. Most of them had internal ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems, and some had their EDI systems directly integrated with these ERP systems.

The vast majority of the people he spoke with had in-house EDI systems rather than outsourced or hosted systems.

As Porter explained, "we have about three-hundred different B2B vendors and approx. two-hundred customers, and we are growing at the rate of 30 to 40 percent per year. Earlier in 2007, the business volume became overwhelming, and based on what I was able to find out about staffing levels, we brought another EDI administrator on within the last couple months," he said.

Porter works in the IT department, and while he is responsible for the day to day operation of the EDI system and for mapping updates, he calls on the IT department's programming staff as needed.

Porter explains his findings, "I found one company that was dealing with about 700 to 1,000 trading partners with 12 staff members. Another had two employees handling 250 trading partners, but handling 10 transaction types, and that company was looking to add more staff. One person said he was handling $14 billion in sales volume all by himself. The data is all over the map."

What Porter got from all this is:

Conclusion

Porter's exploration of the EDI community's staffing levels didn't show broad-based consensus on the number of EDI staffers per trading partner or transaction volume, but it was enough to get H.D.Smith's senior management to understand it needed to make a serious adjustment.

The additional staff member is helping the company keep pace with its growth, but as Porter says, "we expect to add another staff member for EDI duties within the next 12 months."

Source: Line 56