In this blog, we will go over the setup of EDI integrations and show how easily your business and/or operations team can automate Partner onboarding in Adeptia.
First let’s take an example of an EDI 204 transaction lifecycle with a trading partner.
EDI 204 is Load Tender sent out by a customer to a transport/logistics carrier (shipper). Shipper after receiving the EDI 204 sends out a functional acknowledgment EDI 997 and an EDI 990 Load Tender Response notifying the Customer of its acceptance to ship the product. Shipper then sends out an EDI 214 Shipment Status to the Customer notifying the freight details, delivery date/time, and destination of the product shipment. Once the freight is delivered, the shipper sends out an EDI 210 Freight Invoice to the Customer for payment. EDI 856 transaction is sent to the Receiver of the freight that includes order information, descriptions of products, types of packaging used, carrier information and more.
Suppose a customer sends out an EDI 204 to a shipper called Joe Trucking Company. Below is the lifecycle diagram of EDI 204 between the Customer requesting the freight to be shipped and Joe Trucking Company.
In the above diagram, for the inbound transaction, the EDI 204 mapping is done. Meaning EDI 204 is mapped to Transport Management Systems such as TMW XML file format. The outbound files are being mapped from TMW XML to the EDI format.
Now let’s walkthrough the steps of how a business user manages a particular Customer’s EDI 204 Transactions in Adeptia. User clicks on the Customer profile and clicks on View Transactions as shown below. In this page, a user can also click on Invite Partner and add new customers into your network in a seamless way. This streamlines customer onboarding, making it faster up to 80%. To add, you can categorize your customers under different Networks such as Enterprise Accounts, Logistics, Rail, Vendors, etc.
Clicking on View Transactions shows a list of configured transactions for that Customer. Each of the tiles shown below represent an EDI transaction describing the transaction type, flow direction and the partner. User clicks on the EDI transaction and can edit any of the properties such as EDI 204 mapping, source and target endpoints, rules governing the schedule and polling intervals that kick-off the execution of the message.
Each of the transactions shown above contains the following properties:
- Selection of EDI Message Type such as 204, 210, 214, 990
- Mapping between EDI to Transport Management System data formats such as XML, CSV, Excel, JSON etc.
- Source and Target endpoints in terms of how the message will be received and where to send the converted output
Mapping is key part of the EDI integration and Adeptia provides a business user-friendly mapper interface that allows user to either reuse an existing template map or create a new map. Mapper interface is graphical and browser-based and contains all the functions and EDI format capabilities that are needed to transform your EDI data to any other format such as XML, Flat File, JSON, CSV, Fixed Length, Excel, etc. Transaction can also integrate your output data directly with your Shipment Tracking software. Mapper includes functions such as Cross-Reference tables, Math formulas, Aggregation, Pivots and many others. It also allows user to run database queries to do lookups into external data repositories.
In terms of Dashboards and Reporting, Adeptia provides full visibility of the entire EDI lifecycle as described above. Here’s a snapshot of the EDI Dashboard and the X12 Interchange Logs.
In addition to the Dashboard, Adeptia also provides EDI X12 Interchange logs as shown below. The logs provide a full B2B Transaction view of the inbound/outbound transactions, links to actual source data, partner identification, and status. User can drill-down and see more details and see errors and can take corrective actions.
Adeptia provides users the ability to track any EDI fields that they would want to search in the dashboard. For example, user can track Shipment ID in EDI 204 and when that Shipment ID is searched in Advanced Search screen, any EDI transaction that matches the Shipment ID will show up in the search results. Thus, a particular EDI 204, EDI 990, EDI 214, EDI 210 belonging to a Shipment ID will be shown in the results. This helps the Operations and CSRs to respond to customer inquiries more efficiently. Features such as resubmitting an EDI is also available in situations when a Partner does not receive the file and asks your CSR to resend a file.
Another key aspect to Adeptia is that it also provides a client-facing interface for partner user to login and configure EDI exchange. You can also refer to the Adeptia solution for Rail Logistics.
In regards to integrating with Target applications, Adeptia provides out-of-the-box connectors to SAP IDoc/BAPI/tRFC, Sage, Oracle, JDE and Transportation Systems. In terms of Source and Target locations, Adeptia supports AS2 (Drummond certified), SFTP, REST/SOAP APIs, HTTPS, Email and also connectors to ERP and Transport Management (TMW) systems.
