Why I built SignalEDI

I've spent twenty-five years in ERP and integration work. For the first stretch of that career I was the consultant: the person a company brought in to make its systems talk to each other, to its warehouse, to its trading partners. Later I moved in-house and led operations, which meant living with the systems I used to hand over and walk away from.

Both seats teach you the same lesson from different angles. The software was never the hard part. The connections were. An ERP that runs perfectly in isolation is an expensive filing cabinet; the value, and nearly all of the risk, sits in the seams where one company's data has to become another company's data.

Whatever the industry, whatever the size of the project, every implementation eventually ran into EDI. A data format older than the web, holding up go-lives, quietly taxing every order and claim that moved through it. It was treated like weather: nobody asked why it still worked this way, because the answer was always the same. It just does.

Twenty-five years of watching that wall taught me it wasn't a technology problem. The format is old but it is not hard. What made it expensive was everything wrapped around it: the tooling, the gatekeeping, and the pricing.

Across all of it, the companies getting the worst deal were asking for the least. That's the whole list below. The tooling industry just never considered them worth building for.

SignalEDI is what I kept wishing existed on the other side of the table, whichever side I was on that year.

The same discipline now extends to healthcare: eligibility, claims, and prior authorization. The pain is the same shape there — an old format, opaque intermediaries, small teams paying enterprise prices — except a patient is waiting at the end of it.