Previously, we’ve covered in detail the technical functions of a B2B Integration solution and the key features that companies should look for in a platform to handle basic EDI message integration for business applications. Today, let’s expand on that and explore additional factors that should also govern an efficient and successful EDI integration strategy. Here’s a typical EDI transaction process flow.
During new customer onboarding, there are three essential operational categories that need to be at the center of a streamlined EDI integration strategy.
- The Process of Managing Trading Partner Data
- The Management of Discrepancies in EDI Messages
- A ‘Unified’ Cross-Platform View of the EDI Message Lifecycle
It is crucial to find an EDI integration solution that contains functional components that address issues of remediation, where a user can open the EDI message in a workflow form, edit the data, and resubmit it for processing. Some of the important electronic data interchange features to look for include:
- Ability to add missing required data using rules (cross-border information, country codes, carrier-specific elements)
- Ability to support multiple EDI document types like shipping notices, purchase orders, invoices, acknowledgment, financial statements, products, and sales catalogs
- Ability to support most common communication protocols are FTP, OFTP, HTTP, etc. to establish a connection with respective trading partners
- Ability to create rules for inserting missing information provided by the customer
- Ability to use destination fields to identify shipments crossing international borders (in case of EDI 204 load tender, CLM, etc.)
- Ability to query/view records added to the EDI database by searching or filtering various fields
- Ability to perform lookups into the referential database and pull in the valid codes
- Ability to drill down into each record to see the logs or codes for all that has happened to the record (translations, updates, etc.)
- Ability to pull a base EDI map, make changes to it, and make a copy for a new customer
- Ability to set up new business partners at the speed of business, possibly in minutes.
- Ability to verify compatibility with existing systems and applications
- Ability to confirm seamless integration with trading partners’ systems
- Ability to support popular file formats, communication protocols, and ERP/CRM systems
- Ability to automate data mapping, transformation, and validation
- Ability to implement workflow management tools for efficient processing
- Ability to enable notifications, alerts, and exception handling
- Ability to provide real-time insights into EDI transactions
- It should offer dashboards, reports, and analytics capabilities and monitor transaction status and identify bottlenecks
Taking these features of electronic data interchange features into account is necessary for an efficient and successful EDI integration strategy, but it’s also important to look to the future and consider scalability. You can meet consumer’s expectations easily. As your customers grow, it is inevitable that the variation in the EDI data will also grow over time. So, customers will need to be able to add custom segments or codes in their files or require you to add custom segments or codes in your outgoing messages. In order to manage these data changes, your EDI solution should be able to provide a comprehensive list of features of electronic data interchange that allows your operations team to go in, open up the EDI and make manual changes, or pull-up existing rules from a database and apply these edits (a non-programmer function) automatically on the message. Once you can do that, you can easily pull in more customers and increase sales.
At Adeptia, we believe we have considered and addressed all of these crucial electronic data interchange features, and we are in the business of helping companies achieve their maximum EDI integration efficiency and offer a delightful customer experience.
Conclusion
The Adeptia integration platform provides self-service capabilities to democratize data and empower business users. By putting integration in the hands of business teams, Adeptia helps enterprises become more nimble, agile, and data-driven. Critical initiatives are accelerated when the people who know the business best can securely and reliably access the data they need. With intuitive, configurable interfaces aligned to user needs, business owners get on-demand access to integrated data to accelerate use cases without IT bottlenecks.