West London Institute's experience of implementing EDI ordering

Electronic transmission of orders is not a new idea. For some years it has been possible to order from the larger book suppliers online, with the advantage of being able to interrogate their holdings first. For us though, as customers of BLCMP, the situation was complicated. Our acquisitions software covers the financial side to ordering at the time of order creation — prices are committed to funds as the order is made. Orders sent online to our suppliers on one system would have had to be entered again on our BLCMP system so that the order file and funds could be kept up to date. Although we were interested in a faster form of creating our orders, we were not interested in duplicating work.