1. Gamo outdoor uSa takeS aim at edi inteGration
the leading manufacturer of outdoor sporting goods targets a move
to hosted edi as part of a transition to SaP r/3
By Andrew K. Reese
Juan Rodriguez had a problem. Back in 2009, the IT Hosted EDI has been around for only about a dozen years,
director at Gamo Outdoor USA was overseeing the but already the market includes several established players.
company’s move from the Sage MAS 200 enterprise Rodriguez says that he reviewed a total of four different
resource planning system to SAP R/3. Trouble was, the companies before settling on a provider called DiCentral.
company’s EDI provider at the time did not support SAP. Houston-based DiCentral helped establish the Web-
To make the SAP project successful, Rodriguez needed hosted EDI space when it was founded in 2000. Today
to find a new provider that could support Gamo’s EDI DiCentral offers a variety of hosted solutions targeted at
communications with its top clients. buying organizations and suppliers. Its trading community
encompasses major players across such industries as retail,
“We do EDI with just a small percentage of our total
petrochemical, telecoms, manufacturing, and shipping and
customers, but it makes up about 50 percent of our
logistics, among others.
transaction volume,” Rodriguez says. “Our larger partners
require EDI. They won’t do it any other way.” Naturally, Rodriguez says that he tapped DiCentral for the project
then, finding a reliable EDI solution was critical to the in part because of the favorable feedback that he read
business. online about the service provider’s offering. DiCentral, in
particular, has developed a reputation in the market as a
Aiming for Hosted good option for companies looking to do EDI in conjunction
Gamo Outdoor USA is the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based with an SAP ERP system. DiCentral claims as many as 30
unit of Gamo Outdoor, S.L., the Spanish manufacturer large SAP integration clients in multiple industries.
of airguns that also is the world’s top producer of pellets
Rodriguez also checked the customers that DiCentral
for air rifles and pistols. The Spanish parent company
already was working with, and it turned out that many
was rolling out R/3 worldwide, and when it came time to
of these companies were Gamo customers. “When you
implement the ERP system in the U.S. business, Rodriguez
start with a new trading partner, doing the integration is
headed up the project.
not easy,” the IT director notes. “There’s a lot of fine
When it became clear that the company’s EDI provider tuning, a lot of effort, and it takes time. Since
could not make the leap with Gamo to SAP, Rodriguez DiCentral had some of our trading partners
began looking around for an alternate solution. He
as customers already, I knew that they would
researched online and looked for feedback on different EDI
service providers. One option that he considered was for already have the integrations. That would make it
a Web-based, or hosted, EDI solution that enabled buyers much easier for my company.”
and suppliers to exchange data over the Internet.
Complex Migration
Under the hosted model, the EDI service provider
assumes responsibility for mapping data connections with Gamo Outdoor USA worked over the course of 2009
various parties, alleviating the provider’s customers of the with its SAP implementation team, as well as with the
need to maintain any significant number of full-time staff technical team at DiCentral, with the goal of bringing the
devoted to managing the EDI connections. Also, since the R/3 solution live together with the Web-based EDI on
connections are conducted via a Web interface, companies January 1, 2010. Rodriguez says that going through the
using hosted EDI don’t need to maintain hardware ERP implementation and simultaneously working on the
dedicated specifically to EDI connectivity. integration side with DiCentral represented something of
a challenge.
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2. “Going through an ERP implementation is a big deal, company moves to a hosted EDI solution that offers, as
especially when you’re going from a small system like does DiCentral, easier access to transactional data through
MAS 200 to a system like SAP R/3. There was a lot of data a Web portal.
that we had to move from one system to the other, and it
“DiCentral’s Web layer captures all the data about the
was very challenging for us. But then we couldn’t forget
transactions that a company is conducting with its trading
about the EDI because that was very important for us, too,”
partners,” Neadeau explains. “This allows the company
Rodriguez says.
to verify the accuracy of data or to provide information
He adds: “We had to change some things on the about the data to its partners. This is useful, for example,
fly because some things didn’t work the way if a partner claims that they didn’t receive an ASN on
the 10,000 cartons that you sent them, and says that
that we initially wanted. But the technical team at
they’re going to fine you $10 per carton as a penalty.
DiCentral was not only very knowledgeable, they You can go into the system, verify that the ASN went
always were on top of things. We were in touch out and was acknowledged with an EDI 997 Functional
with them constantly, and DiCentral was always Acknowledgement, and that the information in the ASN
able to help us work through any issues.” was accurate.”
Ultimately, Gamo did go live with the ERP system at
[Sidebar:] EDI - Sexy?
the start of last year, but it continued to use its old ERP Is decades-old EDI still sexy? Absolutely, according to
system for EDI for a time after the R/3 launch. Each day, Benoit J. Lheureux, a vice president of research at analyst
the project team would migrate whatever EDI they had firm Gartner.
done the previous day, using the old system, onto the new
solution. DiCentral’s team helped to set up the mapping Lheureux noted in a posting on the Gartner Blog Network
for different messages – purchase orders, advanced ship (http://blogs.gartner.com/) earlier this year that EDI
notices, invoices – to Gamo’s trading partners. The delay continues to be, in his words, “hot.”
in switching to the hosted EDI solution had nothing to do
“EDI remains — and will remain for years to come
with DiCentral, Rodriguez emphasizes. “It’s just because
of how complex the migration was.”
— a high-impact, valuable asset to business,” the
analyst writes. “More innovative approaches should be
Focusing on Other Priorities used for greenfield projects, but EDI is a well-established
approach that is still a vital component of most companies
Initially Gamo launched with DiCentral by connecting with
overall B2B strategy...”
13 trading partners. Currently Gamo connects with 17
different trading partners using DiCentral, with plans to Lheureux begins the post by highlighting the fact that he
add new trading partners to the network over time, when had received three research queries in the space of a few
it makes sense, on a case-by-case basis. days specifically asking for briefings on EDI. But he points
out that often those clients actually want to talk about B2B
Moving to the hosted solution, Rodriguez says, has been
connectivity more broadly, touching on not only EDI but
a significant boon for his IT staff. “In the past, we had to
also XML, Cloud-based solutions and other B2B data tools.
fix issues at our office and spend a lot time on fixing them.
That wasn’t what we wanted to be doing,” he says. Now Yes, the analyst acknowledges, the market offers an
DiCentral takes the responsibility for responding to any increasing number of innovative alternatives to EDI. “But
issues that arise as part of its service to Gamo, so moving you gotta be realistic — and in any well-established B2B
to the Web-based solution freed up Rodriguez’s staff to community, EDI is ubiquitous — and it works. It still
work on different projects. “We can focus on our other delivers value to business because it automates B2B
priorities,” the IT director says. processes — and can be instrumented to help drive
process improvement. What’s not to like about that?”
Gamo also has been able to eliminate chargebacks that
used to occur as a result of incorrect data being sent to Delivering value, it turns out, is still very sexy indeed.
trading partners. Mike Neadeau, vice president of sales
with DiCentral, says that this is typically the case when a
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