The economic downturn forced organizations to review their IT business processes today. Increasingly Third-Party Outsourcing (TPO) reported a provider approached in terms of EDI outsourcing operations. Initially, the decision to perform EDI is easy.

It is considered of making an upfront investment in hardware, software, and development and then pocketed the profits from transaction fees decreased and during that short time, the cost of the initial investment has been recovered.

This is the time when EDI moves from being a profit center to being a cost center and companies start looking at how they could save even more money. At this point outsourcing, edi solutions may become a consideration. Outsourcing EDI comes in many varieties and flavors.

Finding and implementing the right solution depends on the state of readiness of the organization. A state of readiness is defined as follows:

• Is the new business began operating EDI?
• Is doing business already with one or more EDI trading partners?

Under the first scenario, the business may be forced to become EDI by one or more of its trading partners. It could also mean that EDI may just be the company's needs. The first scenario is easy to evaluate since there is no established EDI process and operational requirements must be considered. The second scenario is more complex because the business EDI department can fall into one of three categories.

A one-person shop, handling a minimum number of transactions, with the occasional mapping changes or version upgrades. This guy spent most of his time waiting for new EDI activities.

One or two departments with a high volume of transactions were overwhelmed with the change request, constant production problems, and set up (certification) new trading partners.