With the deadline a few days away, Sobel-Konezney had gotten as far as being able to download purchase orders, but when she tried to transmit invoices, JCPenney would receive them in garbled form. Frustrated, she enlisted the help of a computer-savvy business neighbor who'd had some experience with EDI. When he couldn't fix the problem either, Sobel-Konezney knew she would miss the deadline. She pleaded with JCPenney for a reprieve. The company agreed to allow her to send her invoices and shipping notices manually for the first season. Having spent $4,055 on hardware and $500 on GE's EDI software, Sobel-Konezney received six purchase orders over the wires. And she was only halfway there. "It was a nightmare," she recalls. "I knew I needed more help."
Sobel-Konezney finally hired a consulting firm, EDI Options Inc. It took only a moment for founder Neil Abbruzzese to recognize Sobel-Konezney's problem: GE's DOS-based EDI program was just too complex. The software required that Sobel-Konezney learn a series of arcane codes and verification numbers that meant nothing to her. Abbruzzese eventually switched her to an AT&T network and loaded a more user-friendly DOS-based application onto her machine.
By the following Christmas season, Sobel-Konezney could send invoices and receive purchase orders and manifests. But even with EDI running smoothly, she has yet to see any efficiency gains. If anything, the new system has created more work. She used to give her truck drivers a manifest that was color coded to indicate which of six different JCPenney warehouses each like-color-coded package was destined for. She would also send a copy of the manifest to the JCPenney buyer as backup.
Now she sends a manifest to the buyer electronically, but because the electronic form doesn't include information important to the driver, such as shipping weight and warehouse destination, she types out a different manifest for her drivers. "After all the money and time and aggravation, I'm stuck doing things twice," she says.
This past season Sobel-Konezney sent 12 purchase orders, 2 manifests, and 12 invoices on $45,000 in sales with JCPenney. She recently told her salesman to inform other clients that she was "EDI capable," but there has been no interest in her hard-won new capability.
Making EDI Pay Off
If everything seemed to go wrong, EDI-wise, for Pen Notes, Cedar Works has had the golden touch. The company sells its products through more than 200 retailers, but Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is by far its largest customer. Cedar Works was even profiled in an advertisement as part of Wal-Mart's Buy American campaign.
When Wal-Mart asked Cedar Works to begin using EDI, the company spent little time in debate, recalls co-owner Roy Willman. "It was a no-brainer," he says. "If you want to do business with certain accounts, you need to have some ability to do EDI. The costs aren't that extreme."
Rather than even attempt to get EDI going without help, Cedar Works immediately brought in EDICT Systems Inc., an EDI consultant, in Dayton, Ohio. Willman purchased a modem and a 486 computer from a local computer store and then had EDICT install and configure Formula One, a $2,000 DOS-based EDI application. Formula One "greets" data coming from Wal-Mart or any other EDI trading partner and allows Cedar Works to filter the information into a usable format, such as a report or a corporate database.
About three months after Wal-Mart had asked Cedar Works to use EDI, Lowe's Companies Inc., a retail chain based in North Wilkesboro, N.C., also asked Cedar Works to receive purchase orders electronically. Although Cedar Works could use the same computer and software for both companies, Wal-Mart's purchase orders had to be downloaded over the giant retailer's proprietary network. Cedar Works also had to buy a $1,500 bisynchronous modem, the only type of modem that works over Wal-Mart's network. For Lowe's -- and most other retailers -- Willman could choose from a variety of companies that provide secure private networks for data transmission. He decided on OrderNet, today known as Commerce:Network, operated by Sterling Software's Network Services Division, in Dublin, Ohio. Commerce:Network provides Cedar Works with a mailbox -- fees start at $50 a month -- that the small supplier can dial into at any time to download purchase orders.
Cedar Works spent $7,000 to go on-line with Wal-Mart and Lowe's. But not much changed in the way the small company received its purchase orders. In the past, order manager Lisa Hanson had received a faxed copy of a purchase order from a customer and punched it into the Cedar Works system. Now Hanson dialed up Wal-Mart or Commerce:Network, downloaded purchase orders, and printed them out. Because Cedar Works' EDI system was not connected to its corporate database, Hanson continued to key purchase orders into the corporate database by hand so that work orders, packing slips, and invoices could be generated and sent off. "We were really using EDI as a glorified fax machine," says Willman.
