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Trends & Technologies

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) 101

August 31, 2016 by Matt Cook No Comments

Photo: Ministry of Information, Singapore; William Cho

The term “enterprise information management” seems to capture the whole world, right? But this term applies to the indexing, searching and compilation of information (not necessarily data) from all of the places in your enterprise where documents might reside.

Gartner defines EIM as “an integrative discipline for structuring, describing and governing information assets across organizational and technological boundaries to improve efficiency, promote transparency and enable business insight.”

It’s hard to tell where document/information management leaves off and (data or information) analytics begins. This is part of the mashing up of software functionality that is going on in the market today.

Information is everywhere – in emails, presentations, documents stored on a company’s server, individual user hard drives, servers in the cloud, etc. So traditional search software is somewhat ineffective, because it expects data or documents to be neatly organized inside a box where it can simply sort through data and return matches to your query.

Modern enterprise information management (EIM) software is different because it can search multiple and geographically and systematically separate sources according to terms defined by the user. It does this usually through a web browser.

The market for these tools arose because companies generated tons of documents without any “filing” standards, other than placing them on a corporate shared drive or on people’s PC hard drives. As a result, it was almost impossible to assemble all documents within a company’s four walls related to a particular customer, vendor, product, project, formula or activity. The ability to perform this type of search is especially important to legal professionals, who must respond to government inquiries or parties involved in litigation. This type of search is referred to as e-discovery.

Just a few years ago, I worked on a project like this, except it was referred to at that time as a records retention project, and we installed software from vendor L. The software was basically a search tool for the company’s numerous internal file directories, and required the indexing of every file according to pre-established criteria, and the establishment of a document hierarchy and permission levels. It also assumed that all of the company’s 1,200 employees would store all of their documents on the company’s shared drives, and no longer use their PC hard drives to store files (this was not realistic).

Today, the company that used vendor L is implementing a different system that is capable of locating files anywhere within the company’s network – shared drives, hard drives, emails. In less than 24 months, software that cost over $1 million to implement was rendered obsolete.

EIM usually includes e-discovery tools, and tools for managing content or knowledge, such as user guides, formulas, troubleshooting guides, business process steps or standard operating procedures, system diagrams, and documents critical to retaining official records.

Clearwell Systems, acquired in 2011 by Symantec, is a leader in the e-discovery field. Symantec also offers other EIM solutions. The Symantec web site says this about the Clearwell e-discovery application: “The Clearwell eDiscovery Platform, nominated as a Leader in Gartner’s 2012 Magic Quadrant for eDiscovery, provides users with one seamless application to automate the legal hold process, collect data in a forensically sound manner, cull-down down data by up to 90%, and reduce review costs by up to 98% through the use of Transparent Predictive Coding.”

My advice with this type of software is 1) like any software, garbage in = garbage out, so make it easy for users to do what they need to do for compliance; otherwise users will invent ways to work around your application, not use it; 2) whatever you are archiving must be important so put it in a secure environment with a redundant backup; and 3) as soon as you index, categorize, and digitize your enterprise information you will think of new ways of using it so pick a vendor with a wide range of services and solutions.

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Trends & Technologies

What Causes EDI Failures? Data.

September 26, 2015 by Matt Cook No Comments

Image: r2hox; data.path Ryoji.Ikeda – 4

EDI has been for many years the work-horse for any sizable company that wants to efficiently conduct business with its trading partners (suppliers and customers).  But EDI has one annoying tendency: message failures; that is, a message (purchase order, invoice) that failed to reach its intended receiver.  No message, no PO, no invoice, no transaction, no sale, no cash.

EDI works a lot like the tasks that contestants have to perform on The Amazing Race: something has to be rendered in precisely the way prescribed, or contestants do not advance.  When the contestants fail, they do not know why, which is also generally the case with EDI failures – and an investigation of the failed message is required.

EDI messages have many segments that, arranged in a particular way, constitute the “map” for the message.  The segments are populated with data, such as customer number, product number, gross price, and net price.  Trading partners agree on a standard map for each type of transaction and therefore on the segments and the data structure within the map.  Any deviation from standard results in message failure.

These deviations stem from the every-day mundane workflow: a product number is changed on the sending or receiving end, data is entered incorrectly, new product master data isn’t uploaded into someone’s system, a suffix or prefix is added to a value in one of the segments, a trading partner changes part of the map and fails to communicate the change, or a required field is blank.  Adding to the complexity are increasing demands for more data on the EDI message itself, some of which, such as warranty information, is nearly impossible to integrate into an EDI map.

For the master data portion, data synchronization tools exist and are important in an EDI environment.  Methods to keep these records in sync range from emails to spreadsheet uploads to third party services.  It’s not exciting work, which is why it’s so easy to give it little attention.

There are at least three ways to align data between trading partners.  One is to employ electronic synchronization through standard EDI messages.  In this scenario, the systems used by your trading partners are immediately updated for changes in your master data.  Another is to use a third party data management service such as 1 World Sync, and another is to incorporate your data synchronization with your EDI services company.  SPS Commerce is one EDI services firm that has developed item data maintenance as part of its offerings, and it offers user portals to identify and display messaging errors and message tracking in human-readable formats.

I believe EDI is something that should be outsourced, and so for me incorporating data synchronization through an EDI services company is the best option.  The electronic and third-party data synchronization solutions also potentially leave out many data elements that are critical for uninterrupted EDI messaging, such as DUNs numbers, banking information, item cross-referencing, and special codes.

Having said that, nothing is foolproof.  Human mistakes can’t be avoided.  Until someone invents the next generation of e-commerce we are stuck with traditional EDI and its weaknesses; being aware of those weaknesses is the first step to overcoming them.

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