Acumatica (a Cloud ERP software company) recently announced a partnership with Connect Global One (an EDI vendor with a cloud EDI solution). The press release includes the standard quotes, customer benefits of EDI and ERP software, and company value propositions, but there were two things of interest that can be inferred from the release.

Microsoft Windows Azure Meets Amazon EC2

Acumatica’s SaaS offering runs on Microsoft Windows Azure while Connect Global One runs its Mond Cloudware (EDI solution) on Amazon EC2. Through the application layer the two clouds are connected. This doesn’t mean that you can share computing resources between Amazon and Azure, but it does mean that you can conduct business between clouds. To take it one step further, a company running a solution that uses industry formats such as SAP IDoc, xCBL, etc. can connect with cloud systems through the application layer – provided the connection only requires exchange of standard business documents.

The scalability and efficiency of this type of technique should be acceptable for a large volume of transactions. Since cloud computing can rapidly scale, the only limiting factor would be the bandwidth to the cloud. Since EDI is intended to minimize bandwidth to facilitate rapid transaction processing, the solution should handle a large volume of transactions .

Time to Integrate

Connect different Clouds

The challenge comes if the standard format does not support a transaction that you want to perform. Let’s say that you have a special status for your orders called “transforming from car to machine” that is part of your standard shipping process or a critical field in your documents that is not part of the standard data set. In this case, you will have to customize your deployment or wait for all of the different standard to adopt your particular type of transaction.

Summary

A cloud-based electronic data interchange (EDI) service can help companies connect different cloud applications. This is especially true if you have standard business processes and ERP systems that map to standard business document exchange standards.

Experts say that 80-85% of organizational data falls into the unstructured category. David Cappuccio from Gartner is quoted in ChannelWeb as naming unstructured data as a key trend that needs to be addressed. The problem is that ERP and accounting systems only utilize structured data.

There are several ways of overcoming this (indexing, meta-data, advanced imaging techniques, etc). But in this post, we will focus on an interesting solution for ERP and accounting … data linking.

Accounting and ERP solutions are structured. Data is organized according to business rules and systems are built to reject data which does not conform to those rules.

Current method: To get data into the accounting system, information from documents such as invoices, purchase orders, contracts, timesheets, expense reports, and receipts is manually keyed. The original document is stored in a filing cabinet or scanned and put on a shared server drive or a file server.

Converting Unstructured Data

• Auditing becomes much easier because documents are linked to transactions.
• Additional details from original documentation are one click away. This is useful because many times all of the financial details are not keyed into a structured format. Terms and conditions, line item details, descriptions, and other information often fall into this category.
• Error checking becomes much easier because original documents are linked.

Journal Entry Linked with Invoice

A much better way: Do not allow data to get into an unstructured format. Have employees enter timesheets and expense reports directly into the accounting system using web-forms so that they can do it from anywhere. Use the “slightly better way” when this is not possible – like in situations where a supplier hands an employee a paper receipt.