If you build it they may not come.

I thought this would be an ideal first post on my new EDI web site, because I’m not sure anyone will ever show up and read these words. If not, I am okay with that.

During the course of my work I have created many interfaces for customers that never panned out. I have created many accounts that were never logged into. Just because someone says they want to integrate and do business with you doesn’t mean it will happen. Even though I’m sure they mean it at the time they are saying it.

Sometimes the trading partner decides to go with a competitor. Sometimes priorities change. Other times the company may go out of business. I’ve seen all of these things happen. I’ve even had one trading partner get raided by the feds and people sent off to jail (https://’en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor,_Bean_%26_Whitaker). Whatever the reason you are just going to have to deal with the fact that you will do wasted work. Its nobody’s fault. It is just the cost of doing business in the EDI space.

The biggest boondoggle that I ever participated in, however, I do blame people. I was very excited to work on a new product. I was working on actually creating a new market that did not currently exist (or exists today). We had one very large customer that wanted to enter into this business with us. The majority of the work fell to the EDI area because a lot of front-end development did not have to be done. It was mainly a lot of passing files around and transforming the data as it passed from one system to the other.

Fairly early in the process the customer decided that they were going to step away and go another route. The company I was with decided to continue on with the project, thinking there would be other customers to come along and take their place. For reasons that are still unclear to me it was also decided to keep the very aggressive schedule for delivering the product. Even though we had no customer.

To make a long story short I worked long hours, weekends, holidays, and was under a great deal of stress for something that never saw the first transaction process through it. We delivered the system. It was not elegant but it was fully functional. We went through a QA and a User Acceptance Test and got sign off. We could receive orders, send invoices, and receive payment files. We had to assume everything for our external interfaces since we had no trading partner that we could test with.

I felt the EDI team asked all of the right questions. We asked quite a bit about why all of the rush when we had no customer. I asked about the probability of another customer coming along when the only one identified decided to end the engagement. I guess there were careers that needed to be made. After everything was said and done it was estimated that about $500,000 was spent on the project with absolutely nothing to show for it. The company said they would never do something like that again without a customer on the other end.

I would like to hear what some of your wasted efforts have been. Leave a comment below.

About the picture: Set in Raufarhöfn, one of the most remote and northernmost villages in Iceland where the Arctic Circle lies just off the coast, the Arctic Henge (Heimskautsgerðið) is under construction. While we were there we had to cook dinner in between the power outages. The village is so remote electricity is not a given.