[562] in I/T Delivery
Monthly Delivery Report for ECAT - New Vendors
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lorraine J. Rappaport)
Fri Sep 7 15:21:29 2001
Message-Id: <200109071921.PAA11958@melbourne-city-street.mit.edu>
Date: Fri, 07 Sep 2001 15:25:44 -0400
To: delivery@mit.edu
From: "Lorraine J. Rappaport" <ljr@MIT.EDU>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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Project Name: ECAT - New Vendors
Project Leader: Lorraine Rappaport
Report Date: 9/7/2001
Project url: http://web.mit.edu/is/delivery/ecat (will go live after
partnership announcement is made to the community next week)
Introduction:
MIT is entering into agreements with several new partner vendors. Three of
these vendors, PC Connection, Dell, and Grainger will become ECAT partners.
As with our other ECAT partners, members of the MIT community will be able
to access the vendors' online catalogs to source products and build a
shopping basket. The contents of the shopping basket will be sent back to
MIT to populate a SAPweb req. and flow through SAP authorizations and
approval steps. Purchase orders will be generated and transmitted to the
vendors automatically. Invoices will be received electronically from the
vendors and posted in SAP automatically.
Accomplishments Past Period:
General:
- Worked with vendors to fine tune the respective contracts and business
agreements
- Updated our OBI 850 order request specification to provide more
meaningful information to the vendors
- Identified and configured appropriate vendor numbers in SAP
PC Connection:
- Identified and introduced the appropriate contacts for the various
components of work
- Held conference calls to review scope of work and identify high-level issues
- Distributed the MIT CA certificate. PC Connection installed the
certificate, tested, and verified that they can accept MIT's personal
certificates.
- PC Connection began coding the OBI 850 order request that formats and
transmits the shopping basket data to SAPweb.
- Resolved several questions regarding handling of shipping information and
other logistics
- Sent sample EDI 850 and 810 transactions to PC Connection
- Created trading partner and event in EDI
- Created test PO transactions in SF2 and successfully translated them in EDI
Dell:
- Completed Dell's client analysis questionnaire
- Reviewed and revised Dell's statement of work document
- Distributed the MIT CA certificate
- Created trading partner and event in EDI
- Began exploration of XML. Dell wants to use XML for formatting both the
order request and PO. Tested XML capabilites of our EDI translation
software.
- Reviewed pages and pages and pages of Dell B2B integration documentation
(zzzzzzzz)
Grainger:
- Continued conversations to scope the work
- Learned that Grainger's catalog upgrade schedule has slipped. They will
not be able to begin work on ECAT until these upgrades occur.
Goals for Next Period:
General:
- Procurement will announce the new partnerships to the community next week
- New partner vendors will participate in next week's Vendor Fair
- Finalize contracts
- Begin work on documentation and training logistics
- Make the project web page ready for prime time
PC Connection:
- Get access to their test catalog and begin testing transactions in SF2
and/or SF5. Fine-tune as necessary.
- Finalize logistics (transport, encryption, delimiters, etc.) for EDI
transactions
- Transmit test EDI 850 (PO) and 810 (invoice transactions). Fine-tune as
necessary.
- Develop detailed plan for moving to production and beginning pilot (pilot
is targeted for October)
Dell:
- Work with Dell to finalize statement of work
- Identify appropriate contacts at Dell
- Begin detailed implementation discussions with Dell contacts.
- Continue work to build XML parser for the order request and generate XML
PO output.
Grainger:
- Keep up to date on Grainger's catalog upgrade schedule
- Continue planning discussions
Other comments:
- Dell's requirement for XML means a lot of new work for us. Nevertheless,
it is work that we have wanted to explore anyway. Other potential ECAT
partners prefer XML. At least one of our current partners wishes to
migrate to XML in the near future. The investment now will pay off later.
