Enabling business users to onboard new Trading Partners into your Partner Network through a self-service portal is one of the key strengths of Adeptia Connect. As part of Partner Management capabilities that are available out-of-the-box, Adeptia Connect enables your business users to invite new Trading Partners, configure Partner profiles and grant access to important data exchange Templates published by your IT Team. Adeptia Connect allows business users to automate the exchange of data between your company and partners. The type of data exchange can vary based on different industry verticals.
Key challenge in B2B Partner data exchange is that most often partners or customers have different systems at their end and demand different data formats. How do we manage this? Hence, Adeptia Connect is the “citizen-integrator, self-service integration” platform for your company to facilitate Partner data integration seamlessly. It helps your company to standardize on common data formats required by your customers and partners for their back-end systems.
For example, a telecommunications company can move away from directly sending invoices to its customers such as enterprises, SMB and carrier companies, via email or regular post. With Adeptia Connect, a company can setup up standard set of “outbound” Invoice templates that would route the Invoices directly to the Customer by using wide variety of connectors. Some of the important connectors are SFTP, AS2, Email, Amazon S3, Quickbooks Online, Salesforce, FreshBooks, secure cloud storage such as Dropbox, and Box etc. Adeptia Connect also provides ERP connectors for SAP and SageOne.
These outbound Templates are embedded with routing logic that allows Adeptia Connect to determine, at runtime, which Customer would receive the invoice once it is generated by the company’s Billing system. Typically, a company can standardize on a couple of protocols on how the invoice are sent to the customers. Taking into account the need for scalability and security, transmission of Invoices and Purchase Orders often use SFTP, AS2 or secure APIs. These protocols provide greater level of visibility, compliance of guaranteed delivery policies, status/acknowledgment alerts related to when an invoice is sent or received by a customer and a better way of invoice tracking/monitoring by the Operations team.
Also, Adeptia Connect enables direct integration of the telecommunications company’sBilling System with its Customer’s IT systems through a common EDI framework or with a standard set of data formats. Adeptia Connect provides a full list of EDI data dictionaries and pre-built EDI Transaction Sets. These features help in mapping a custom Billing data format into a standard EDI X12 810 format which can then be routed to a customer. Some SMB customers may not have a solution in place to parse or read the EDI data directly. To solve this issue, Adeptia Connect also provides an easy mapping interface to convert a standard output EDI into a native format that can then be imported into the customer’s IT system. These custom formats can range from CSV flat file to XML, Excel, JSON, EDIFACT, IDOC, fixed-width formats etc.
In the next series of screenshots, we will show you how a Partner is on-boarded into a Partner Network. First, a business user creates a Network. Network is a grouping of customers and partners that are categorized into a single logical entity. For example, here we are creating a new Network called ‘Enterprise Customers’ that would contain all the customers that are part of your company’s enterprise customer accounts. Network also helps in organizing your customers and partners through a single grouping.
Business User creates a Network named Enterprise Customers
List of Networks setup by Business Users
Now let’s add an enterprise customer into the Enterprise Customers Network.
Here a business user is adding a new Trading Partner (Customer) and defining its profile which includes EDI properties.
Defining Partner Profile
As part of self-service capability, business user can also invite a Partner to self-register and configure their profile in Adeptia Connect. By allowing Partner to self-manage, Partner users can login to Adeptia Connect and manage their transactions, users and also view Dashboards. Adeptia Connect provides a client-facing portal to Partner users to manage their data integrations with your company.
Once a Partner is added into the Network, user can click on a Network and see a list of all the Partners as shown below.
List of Enterprise Customers in a Network
Business User can manage each Partner by clicking on the tile and selecting the particular option as shown in the image above. For example, a Partner can be granted access to certain data exchange templates published by the IT Team. Access to a template can also be revoked. Business User can click on the Transaction link to see all the configured transactions that are active for a given Partner. Please see below example of all the transactions that the customer has configured by using different data exchange templates.
List of Partner Transactions and Dashboard
Here we are showing three active Transactions for a Partner. First transaction is a Grocery Products Invoice EDI 880. Second transaction in the list is Purchase Order EDI 850 and the third one is ACH Bank Deposit transaction. By selecting any one of the Transaction, business user can click on Run History to see all the runtime logs. Logs consist of different dashboards that show run history, execution details, EDI Interchange logs with details around the number of Transactions in the EDI message, status of each Message, EDI validation errors with descriptions and a copy of the EDI message is saved in a PDF.
Business Users can search with any EDI field such as Invoice Number, Transaction Control Number, Purchase Order Number, and Partner Name to get full visibility of all the EDI and non-EDI messages. All ISA, GS and ST segment fields are also searchable through the dashboard. Adeptia Connect can extract status of backend systems where the data is being routed to for a full end-to-end visibility of the EDI message. The logs also show all outgoing and incoming EDI 997 acknowledgments.