Why iTradeNetwork Sucks

For my “day job”, one of the things I do is EDI system integration with my customer’s back-end accounting system. This involves everything from setting up the EDI communications equipment including hardware, software and encryption certificates to writing software that facilitates the movement of accounting information to and fro.

I also have to deal with my customer’s trading partners’ EDI teams/departments all in an effort to move said data. In the past, I have dealt with sizable corporations who have four very nice but unhelpful southern ladies (belles?) in their EDI department to the world’s largest retailer (Wal-Mart) which has a large EDI department not to mention a very large IT department. For a company with many faults, to their credit, there’s a reason they’re the world’s largest retailer. When they decide to implement a change in the way data is transferred (usually to make things more efficient) it gets done. And quick. And right the first time. At least that’s how it looks from my end.

This brings me to one company in particular which completely amazes me. This company, called iTradeNetwork, was basically hired by Sysco Corporation, which is one of our trading partners, to deal with all of their EDI traffic. My main gripe with them is that THREE years ago, there was wind of Sysco Corp opening a regional distribution center (RDC) in the northeast.

What this means to me is that there will be more data to be transferred. So three years ago, I started working on software to accommodate this RDC. The next thing I knew, the project was shelved. Three years later, I get an email from iTrade Networks saying that I now have a deadline to be ready to receive orders from the RDC. Needless to say, I had a good laugh. As it turns out, this time they were actually serious.

Now that I’m trying to facilitate this connection, I called iTrade Networks, and I use the term lightly, customer service to get some test data in order to speed up development. It has been three days now since my first call. It seems that in order to simply get some test data, a support ticket has to be filed, then escalated and now presumably ignored.

I do not need to mention that this is not the first time that iTradeNetwork has dropped the ball with my customer. In fact, I don’t think that they can even find the ball.

In my opinion, Sysco Corp will perpetually be playing catchup to companies like Wal-Mart due to a bad choice in EDI service providers.