A win-win partnership
EPO Consulting’s EPO Connector for generic data exchange from SAP has been around for years – it’s SAP certified. Increasingly, clients with SAP ERP have been looking for an integrated EDI solution – and that’s where ecosio came in. “We used to get requests for EDI from companies and partners, but we were unable to deliver. Other EDI providers saw us as competition or offered similar products to ours, so we didn’t have the opportunity for partnership before we met ecosio. They quickly recognized this as a win-win situation,” Werner Kroiss, Managing Director, EPO Consulting.
EPO and ecosio met at the Chamber of Commerce’s AUSTRIAPRO association, where electronic invoicing is discussed. Thanks to a pilot client who needed EDI, the EPO Connector was tethered to the ecosio API, including integration of the complete monitoring functionality in the EPO Connector. After the test phase and going live with the pilot client, the EPO Connector became a unique, highly specialized product which is now in service around the clock with numerous clients.
An interface that significantly improves communication
From the beginning, SAP SE used IDocs (Intermediate Documents) as the data exchange format in its ERP software. IDoc is a proprietary format of SAP. This was important from an economic standpoint, but market acceptance was reluctant: a good deal of technical coordination was required, and communication transferred from specialist departments to IT specialists, resulting in numerous problems. Communication in specialist departments had to be monitored by the IT department, with errors corrected in a cumbersome manner. Many questions of responsibility resulted: was this truly a technical error, or perhaps an error incurred by the specialist department? Who was responsible in company A, and with whom should they speak in company B – the IT department or the purchaser?
“When we made the decision to cooperate with EPO Consulting, both companies had a common goal: to resolve the fundamental problems relating to SAP-ERP-EDI once and for all, thereby significantly adding value for SAP clients,”
CHRISTOPH EBM, MANAGING DIRECTOR, ecosio GMBH
