February 27, 2012 – IDEA, a business-to-business technology service provider owned by the electrical industry, has announced a strategic partnership with ecmarket, an eBusiness solution provider, where IDEA will resell the latter’s Conexiom solution, integrating it with the Industry Data Exchange (IDX) network. This integrated solution will be launched as “iConex” to help IDEA customers automate order management processes with trading partners that are not EDI-capable, explained the companies.

“IDEA continually evaluates new partners and technology that can add value to the foundation on which IDEA was built,” said Bob Gaylord, president and CEO of IDEA. “This partnership with ecmarket will enable IDEA’s customers to work more efficiently with trading partners at various levels of technical capabilities without forcing either trading partner to change their business processes.”



With iConex, trading partners will have the ability to generate order management documents, such as purchase orders, in their own unique formats, to be captured, transformed and delivered in an EDI standard format to the final recipient via IDX. A confirmation or acknowledgement can then be automatically generated, converted and delivered back to the sender.

“Through this technology integration, manufacturers and distributors within the electrical industry will be able to fully automate all order entry and processing with 100% data accuracy while leveraging the control, visibility and safeguards that IDEA’s IDX network provides,” said Brent Halverson, president and CEO of ecmarket.


McNaughton-McKay, an electrical distributor headquartered in Madison Heights, Mich., describes itself as an early adopter of IDEA’s iConex solution.

“iConex enables us to convert high volume non-EDI customers to an EDI process with no capital investment, no internal resources and no data errors. The iConex process helps our customer service reps to increase productivity by reducing the time spent on data entry,” said James Wilkinson, director of business process management, McNaughton-McKay. “We truly believe in iConex and think this is a great opportunity to reduce costs and improve customer service.”