Once an organisation has developed and tested its EDI system to the best of its ability, further system tests are conducted in pilot with specific trading partners. The EDI pilot is critical. It allows an organisation to refine its own system and if all goes well, provides the first look at how EDI will make the organisation more efficient. Organisations should set up a pilot project with a small number of trading partners. The organisations with the most EDI experience make the best pilot partners. To be successful, the pilot must focus on one primary EDI application such as simple purchase orders.

In practice, organisations will already have completed limited testing of the system. VANs conduct tests as they connect organisations to their systems. Organisations transmit data to the VANs, which then ensure that the transmissions are reliable. A similar sequence of events occurs with pilot partners. First begin transmitting documents to the pilot partners, which evaluate the transmissions to make sure the pilots can process them accurately. Pilot partners then return data for testing.

As each of these tests are completed successfully, the pilot begins to send for real orders on real time tables, which tests the capability of the system to respond to daily business processes. Paper transactions are not eliminated, however, until both trading partners are completely satisfied that the EDI system is performing as well as or better than existing processes. Once that agreement has been reached , trading partners then agree upon a timetable for eliminating paper transactions in parallel from several weeks to several months depending on the complexity of the EDI system.

Pilot project results must then be analysed from an internal perspective to answer the following questions:
• Can the EDI system maintain adequate control?
• Does the system appear to provide the benefits projected in the original EDI study?
• Will the system handle anticipated EDI traffic?
• Are internal users satisfied with the result?

At some organisations the pilot stage of EDI never really ends, rather than move EDI out in to the broad base of trading partners, it remains a rather isolated system, handling only high-volume trading partners. The final step in EDI implementation is extending EDI capabilities out to smaller and smaller trading partners, for example adding a web form / portal capability and to a greater number of business documents and processes.

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