EDI Specialist

An EDI specialist is a term that simply describes an individual who has a great deal of expertise with EDI. Whether your organization needs a dedicated, in-house EDI specialist depends greatly on two factors, the size or your organization and your reliance on EDI to drive your business. Many smaller organizations, especially ones that are new to EDI at first do not use or have any EDI specialist in house. The cost of having a dedicated resource who will provide only expertise in one dedicated area (EDI) cannot usually be justified by a first time user of EDI. As your company's use of EDI grows however it will quickly become apparent that regardless of how efficient your EDI software is the need for an EDI specialist will continue to grow.

Key Duties of your EDI Specialist

An EDI specialist is a very generic term, many organizations have several roles for the EDI specialist with some having EDI specialists who focus on specific parts of using and implementing EDI in their organizations. For smaller businesses however the EDI specialist is often a generic purpose person whose primary role is to be 100% responsible for the operation of the EDI system. For this reason you will need to ensure that your EDI specialist has experience in not only using but also in maintaining an EDI system. Additionally this person will need to be relatively familiar with the EDI standard you will be using, most often the X12 standard used in the US. If you already have EDI software in house your EDI specialist will either need to be familiar with it or will need to become familiar with it. Duties like updating trading partner information, backing up the EDI system, staying on top of updates and changes to the EDI standards and other similar activities will all be duties of your EDI specialist.

How Important is an EDI specialist? As you read through this definition the question of importance might come up. Specifically, how critical really is it to have an EDI specialist in house? Once again, the answer is going to depend mostly on the volume of EDI data you will process. The greater the volume of EDI data the more likely you are to need the services of an EDI specialist. The reason for this is simple - time savings. Having an EDI specialist on staff is going to save you a great deal of time in managing your EDI and in ensuring that you remain complaint with your trading partners. This is probably the single most important reason to consider the services of an EDI specialist - having to cope and deal with the costs associated with mistakes and errors that your trading partners receive due to improperly set up or maintained EDI software can escalate quickly and often become a driving force behind the hiring of an EDI specialist.

Regardless of your initial decision it's probably going to be a question of time before an EDI specialist becomes a member of your staff. As you embark on your adoption to EDI it would be wise to begin crafting a job requirement and to begin looking for someone who can be identified as the person for the job. The reason for this is rather straight forward. While an EDI specialist is often skilled enough to perform other IT jobs until his duties must focus on EDI, the opposite is not necessarily true since EDI is a highly skilled, highly focused area of expertise that most generic "IT experts" know very little about.

Keeping your EDI Specialist Educated

Once you have an EDI specialist on-staff, the last step is to ensure that your EDI specialist remains well informed and educated on the subject. Your EDI specialist can avail himself of a number of tools and source of information. The EDI specialist should at the very least stay in constant contact with your EDI software vendor - to ensure he has up-to-date information on the software's use and latest updates. Your EDI specialist should also take time to become familiar with the web sites of the standards bodies to keep updated on changes in the standard that might impact your organization. With some form of continuos education and research your EDI specialist can keep your use of EDI at its optimum level for years to come.

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