Consulting and Specification

In the initial phase of EAI- and EDI- projects an analysis of the information to be transferred must be carried out along with an assessment of limitations of the organisation and the IT-application systems that support the business processes.

The service offered by the specialists from LS GmbH starts in this early stadium with advice and support for the:

• Definition of the business processes that are to be linked internally or in cooperation from external partners, ,

• Analysis of the workflows and the information to be exchanged between the business processes, either internally (EAI) or with external partners (EDI, i.e. for orders, invoices, delivery notes etc.),

• Specification of the internal IT application system interfaces with respect to (as output) the information to be produced and (as input) the information to be received. In both cases the technical construction of the information (Syntax and Semantic) must be considered, in the simplest case standards can be referred to (i.e. SAP-IDOCs). Interpretations of the implementation guides,

• Specification of the guidelines from external partners with regard to Syntax (rules for the data structure) and Semantic (vocabulary from words / terminology) of the EDI messages. In the simplest case standards can be referred to (i.e. EDIFACT and subsets). Interpretations of the implementation guides,

• Creation of mapping guides (descriptions of the relationships between the mes-sages) for the data conversion between the various internal interfaces and between them and the message types for the electronic data exchange ,

• Specification of communication method (file transfer, access to database, pro-gramme-programme-communication etc.) between the internal IT application system and the interface. Analysis of the capeabilities of external partners with regard to networking and electronic data exchange services. Specification of any other requirements of the communication process,

• Preparation of the concept in order to select the necessary technical system components,

• Preparation of test data.

As result of this project phase is the technical content and strategic concept can be written.

The realisation and implementation of the system integration are carried out in the next phases.