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The next time you board a Boeing 767 or an Airbus A340 -- or a B-2 stealth bomber for that matter -- think of ELDEC. Headquartered about 30 miles outside of Seattle, ELDEC designs and manufactures the proximity sensors that tell the pilots of those planes whether the door you just walked through is open or closed.

That's what you call a mission-critical component.

But as high-tech as ELDEC is, until recently its customer order management system was decidedly low tech: "rip and read EDI." ELDEC staff logged onto a private network, pulled down orders from the company's customers, printed the orders and hand keyed them into an Oracle enterprise resource planning system.

Now, by implementing an integration appliance from CommerceRoute, ELDEC is bringing customer orders automatically into its ERP system, saving labor costs, increasing order accuracy and providing for better customer service.

The Spec 2000 Issue

ELDEC, with about 900 employees, is a part of Crane Co., a diversified manufacturer of engineered industrial products with operations worldwide and a division devoted to the aerospace industry. While Crane doesn't break out sales for its individual units, overall the company had 1999 sales of $1.5 billion, and the four companies in its aerospace division tallied sales of $363 million for that year.

ELDEC's engineers and manufacturing personnel produce a range of aerospace products, including power products that range from battery chargers and battery systems to inverters and light dimmers, as well as sensing devices that include fuel flowmeters, fuel gauging systems and pressures sensors. And, of course, proximity sensors, which tell aircraft crew the status of aircraft doors, flight controls and landing gear. ELDEC's products are in use on all major U.S. and European aircraft -- both military and commercial -- and its customers include both aircraft OEMs and tier-one assembly providers to the OEMs, as well as major U.S. and international airlines.

The company began a program in 2000 to automate its "rip-and-read EDI" system for processing customers' EDI orders with the goals of reducing the labor costs associated with order management and eliminating the infrequent (but inevitable) errors made during rekeying of the orders into the ERP system. ELDEC also sought to improve its customer service by improving quality and by allowing its customer service reps to access customer orders as they come in rather than waiting for the EDI orders to be entered manually into the ERP system.

ELDEC considered using an EDI gateway product to bring customer orders into the ERP system, but the implementation looked to be a long and costly process, according to Mike Oleson, director of IT for ELDEC. The problem was that the company's airline customers use an EDI standard called Spec 2000 established by an aviation industry standards body. Spec 2000 differs from the X12 standard widely used in manufacturing. Oleson says that ELDEC would have had to develop internally the software to convert the Spec 2000 EDI data coming in from its airline customers into a format the ERP system could understand. The cost of the entire project, potentially running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, was also off-putting.