One of my friends, Siamak who is currently working with Volvo Trucks in Sweden has written this interesting post at Supply Chain Management Forum about using EDI in supplier integration.

I specially found two different things in his post interesting:

First, EDI is not a solution for SMEs, but for large comapanies. Small and medium size companies can benefit from development of E-SCM (widely using XML) instead.

And the second, even if a company decides to go for EDI, there are some risks which usually are not technological !! but managerial... Among the important ones are: mutual commitment and trust, social aspects of associated organizations, and power balance and dominance.

What strategies you think are suitable to deal with these challenges?