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BACKGROUND Bendix Commercial Vehicle Systems LLC, headquartered in Elyria, Ohio and a member of the Knorr-Bremse Group, supplies air brake charging and control systems and components, vehicle modules and leading-edge safety technologies for medium and heavy-duty trucks, tractors, trailers, buses and other commercial vehicles in North America, Europe, and Australia. Their annual revenue recently topped the $300 million dollar mark.
In 2001, Bendix was reviewing different options for making changes within their company’s IT department, and one area of focus was how to make improvements to their EDI processes, cut EDI transmission costs that seemed to be constantly on the rise, and upgrade their EDI support.
At the time, Bendix was doing all their EDI processing on a mainframe system. The EDI mapping and support, for over 300 trading partners, was handled on the mainframe by Honeywell personnel located in Tempe, Arizona. The EDI systems were also internally supported and coordinated by 1 or 2 persons in the Bendix IT department. However, the actual EDI maps and support from Honeywell encompassed only part the overall EDI processing. There was also a series of Cobol programs doing a sort of “quasi-translation”, which read and wrote EDI data, hard-coded within the programs. In addition, there was a great amount of so-called “pass-through” EDI data, which was not translated at all, but rather read directly into programs and processed. These quasi-translation and pass-through programs became a necessity over the years because of a lack of mapping and support resources available from Honeywell. There were also a number of manual processes being done on a daily basis to accommodate customer requests and issues.
It was this lack of support, increased costs, and reliance on an aging mainframe technology that prompted Bendix to consider outsourcing their EDI processes to another company that could make the necessary improvements. This also fit into the long-term plan of converting to an SAP system.
ANALYSIS and CONVERSION
In July 2001, Bendix contracted with Promethean, formerly EC/EDI, LTD. for the purpose of transitioning all EDI mapping, support, and monitoring from the Honeywell mainframe over to Promethean's outsourcing service, called Managed EDI Services.
In August, an EDI Analyst from Promethean began on-site work at Bendix, and a conversion plan was put together. The analyst worked closely with both the internal EDI resources at Bendix, and the Honeywell personnel. The first order of business was to define the entire EDI landscape and define all the Trading Partners, maps, processes, and communication methods currently being used on the mainframe. This also took into consideration new requests, future expansion, and any other areas where improvements could be made in the process. The ultimate goal was not only to convert the EDI over to the Managed EDI Services system, but also to streamline and optimize all EDI processes for the purpose of increased efficiency and less cost.
This conversion plan involved a number of steps and goals, all which could be achieved by the Managed EDI Services system:
- Replace quasi-translation programs with actual maps
- Streamline batch job processing, including scheduling and file processing
- Add new Trading Partners and transactions
- Upgrade current transactions (optimize mapping; version upgrades, etc.)
- Add new data integration processes to increase automation and receive the full benefits of EDI
- Apply full reconciliation of EDI acknowledgments
- Increase data archiving and retrieval capabilities
- Increase the overall maintainability and monitoring of the EDI system
At the time the conversion began, the landscape of Bendix’s EDI system looked like this:
70 customer Trading Partners, and 290 supplier Trading Partners
190 customer maps and 10-12 Supplier maps
160 customer transactions and 780 supplier transactions
21 quasi-translation Cobol programs
12 programs processing pass-through data
Over 300 mainframe jobs, processes, and scripts, to handle the daily,weekly, and monthly EDI transactions, along with the required schedules and notifications.
>From a cost standpoint, Bendix was being charged approximately 31 – 37,000.00 each month,depending on the volume, for the EDI processing being done by Honeywell.
The majority of the conversion was completed in less than 6 months. First, all the maps were re-created on the Managed EDI Services system, and tested internally and in parallel. Then each trading partner was migrated to the new system. It is important to note that involvement by the actual trading partners, and the impact to them during the conversion, was very minimal. As each trading partners was migrated, notice was given to that partners VAN to change the ID’s from the Honeywell VAN to PrometheanEC/EDI.
Also during the time, a large effort was put forth to streamline the jobs that processed the EDI data. The job schedules were re-done, notifications of job failure and other errors were put in place, new transactions were added, and a number of other measure were put in place to streamline the entire EDI process and make it more error-free.
IMPROVEMENTS
Post-conversion, the EDI volumes that Bendix was able to process increased by more than 30 percent, while their costs for doing EDI dropped almost 25 percent. In other words, they were now processing 30% more data, in a more streamlined, fully monitored environment, for 20% less cost.
The improvements to the Bendix EDI processes reached another pinnacle in 2006, when Bendix converted off of their mainframe to an SAP system. This was obviously a huge undertaking, and of course the EDI processes had to be converted as well as all other IT functions. The streamlining and improvements that were done 5 years earlier, and that were enhanced over the previous 3-4 years, now allowed for a much smoother transition to SAP.
To this day, Bendix continues to reap the benefits of outsourcing their EDI processes, with ever-improving reliability and cost-savings.
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