Work
Four engagements
Our clients do not announce who maintains their interfaces, and we do not announce our clients. Sector and region below are accurate; everything identifying has been removed.
01 — Chemicals distribution, near Hanau
- Situation
- Order intake was fax and PDF into a shared inbox. Four large buyers had asked for EDIFACT, and two had begun charging a fee per manual order.
- What we did
- ORDERS D96A inbound from all four, ORDRSP and INVOIC outbound, mapped against a mid-market ERP that had never spoken EDIFACT. Two of the buyers' specifications disagreed with their own test systems; we worked that through with their EDI teams before go-live rather than after.
- What runs now
- Twelve message flows, nightly and on demand. An order reaches the ERP within minutes of arrival, and the manual-order fees stopped.
02 — Air cargo handling, Rhein-Main
- Situation
- A handling system exchanged flat files with two forwarders over a shared network drive. Files vanished when both sides wrote at once, and nobody could say whether a missing consignment was never sent or never read.
- What we did
- Moved both exchanges onto SFTP with separate inbound and outbound directories, added acknowledgement files in each direction, and wrote a nightly reconciliation that compares what left against what was confirmed.
- What runs now
- Both forwarder links, four times a night and on demand. The reconciliation report lands at 06:10, and a missing file is a line on it rather than a search through a shared drive.
03 — Food wholesale, in the Wetterau
- Situation
- An ERP changeover with eleven years of IDoc mappings on the old side and a hard licence end date on the calendar.
- What we did
- Rebuilt the mappings against the new system rather than porting them, because half of them encoded decisions nobody could explain. Six weeks of dual-run with both systems fed and every difference explained on a morning list. Cutover over one weekend, runbook written, way back tested and not needed.
- What runs now
- The same document flows on the new ERP. The morning list still runs. Most days it is empty.
04 — Fastener manufacturing, in the Odenwald
- Situation
- Eleven interfaces, no documentation, and the developer who wrote them gone. Nobody could say what would break when a server was next patched.
- What we did
- An inventory first: every job, schedule, file path and counterparty, read out of code and logs. Then a written specification per interface, monitoring across all of them, and a quarter of read-logging on the three nobody could account for.
- What runs now
- Eight interfaces, documented and watched by people who can name them. The other three fed nothing and were retired one per month, with a fallback copy held for a year.