EDI: To have or not to have?

Filed in archive Point of view on March 1, 2006

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?