The company had already deployed software from E2Open to facilitate collaboration between its factories in the Philippines and Japan and those factories’ suppliers. So Jayaraman decided to use the pipe it had already established for that purpose to send EDI documents through the hub. In this way, Hitachi Global Storage has been able to decommission its entire EDI infrastructure without undoing any existing automation used by its trading partners. E2Open maintains an EDI infrastructure for its customers and updates it as needed. For example, if one of Hitachi Global Storage’s business partners establishes a new location, or if a business partner wants to add another transaction, E2Open will add the new IP address or transaction to the existing EDI maps and protocols. Jayaraman says the move to E2Open paid for itself in nine months.

For suppliers such as Panasonic’s Jeanos, who also uses E2Open when dealing with some customers, such a solution isn’t ideal, but it’s better than using proprietary portals and manually keying in thousands of lines of purchase order data. He has been pushing buyers who want him to dump EDI to consider the drawbacks of such a move. In the process, he says, he has been able to forestall indefinitely having to use two of his customers’ portals. "They have agreed to let Panasonic be the last supplier to roll onto their [portal]," he says. In other cases, he has convinced buyers to push files to him electronically, or to allow E2Open to pull data from buyers’ portals and transmit it electronically to Panasonic. Although E2Open presents an additional cost for Panasonic, Jeanos says, "I’d rather have E2Open push files to me electronically than have someone fatfinger in information."