EDI Onboarding / Deployment

EDI onboarding means the initialization of electronic data interchange between trading partners. This is becoming more and more essential as an increasing number of businesses are using EDI for trade transactions. It is about compatible and effective data transfer, and about ensuring the quality of the transmitted message. The biggest reasons for EDI use are speed, data integrity, and easy data processing in own system. This enables process automation to save costs and to gain competitive advantage.

Assign your best professionals to documentation work

EDI messages are based on documentation on what the messages should contain, and the initial requirement for well-functioning electronic data interchange is a high-quality documentation. As EDI messages are meant to be primarily machine readable, someone in the company needs to have special skills for understanding EDI and for creating the needed documentation. It is crucial to reserve enough time and your best resources for the documentation work and to use a suitable application (not Excel or Word) to minimize ambiguities and errors. Ambiguities will cause trouble for both trading partners. Mistakes as a result of poor documentation will lead to the onboarding speed slowing down, a lot of manual work, and a need for expensive communication and meetings between trading partners.

Minimize person dependency

The aspects mentioned above result in EDI tasks and processes easily becoming person dependent. This has a high risk of backfiring, as person dependence is a high risk for any business. If tasks cannot be handled easily by multiple people, what will happen when the specialized staff have holidays, retire, change jobs?

Reducing person dependency is the most important step towards reliable and efficient EDI practices. In addition, ensuring transparency of testing will help to minimize unnecessary contact between trading partners and remove schedule dependence. A testing possibility especially in early onboarding stage is of great importance.

Automate routines

New message types and versions are often needed for complying with different needs and uses. If the deployment and testing routines cannot be automatized, bringing up new message types and versions will be slow. This can even affect the building of new trading partnerships.

The best solution would be creating documentation and validation artifacts from the same source code. It will reduce error and speed up the process, and simplify maintenance and updates. Enabling self-service message validation internally will considerably decrease person dependence, and enabling it for a trading partner will save time and resources for both.

How you benefit from the use of Truugo?

Truugo offers you a solution for creating and maintaining high quality message documentation and validators. These can be shared internally and provided as a self-service for trading partners. By increasing documentation quality and minimizing redundant steps from testing process, you will considerably cut down your EDI expenses.