A Complete EDI Solution when combined with EDI Support LLC services
Boomi stands out as 9x leader in Gartner Magic quadrant in the EDI space and offers broad cloud-based EDI capabilities including integration, EDI/B2B management, API management, Master Data Hub and Flow Workflow Automation. It is important to understand that Boomi provides the software and offers implementation service options through their third-party partners. EDI Support LLC is one of the Boomi’s EDI implementation partners that helps companies by implementing Boomi EDI software if they are looking for a new EDI solution and migrating from legacy EDI infrastructure to Boomi at affordable costs. From trading partner on-boarding, end-to-end testing, going live with your trading partners and daily monitoring of your EDI documents, we take care of everything.
Let’s understand how Boomi stands out in the six foundational functionalities that any EDI product should support and the role of EDI Support LLC in making the implementation successful
A supplier company usually does EDI with many trading partners and their EDI system should maintain the trading partner details to identify the data received from them. If the supplier is using Boomi, trading partner details are configured in a trading partner component where the envelope information, documents exchanged and communication is maintained. When a document is received in the Boomi EDI server, the processor identifies the partner using EDI ID and Qualifier present in the document. If there is no valid trading partner configuration present in Boomi EDI server for the document received, the integration process would fail because of no matching trading partner configuration.
Trading partner systems communicate with each other to exchange documents on an agreed communication protocol. Boomi supports AS2, SFTP, FTP, HTTP and disk to receive/send EDI documents. Based on the agreed protocol, connection information has to be exchanged to successfully connect the trading partner EDI systems. The initial part of the partner on-boarding process involves gathering EDI implementation guidelines, samples and connection related documents. Establishing connectivity is a critical piece which generally involves opening inbound and outbound IPs. Once the connection details are exchanged, we proactively perform connection tests for test and prod environments to avoid last minute connectivity issues
EDI Support LLC engages with your trading partners and collects all the required information such as their EDI IDs, documents to be exchanged and preferred communication method to successfully on-board them.
Document validation is an important functionality for an EDI system because it is imperative for it to process only a valid document. Most trading partners expect an EDI 997 (functional acknowledgement) document and accept or reject EDI 997 is sent based on the document validation.
An EDI document’s layout or structure is defined and represented in Boomi using a Profile component. For EDI standards, the profile can be imported from Boomi’s built in templates. The built-in boomi templates come pre-configured with mandatory fields, data types, minimum/maximum lengths and validation rules as per EDI standards. When a document is received from the trading partner, it is validated based on the configuration in the EDI profile referenced in the documents section of the trading partner component. If it is valid, the document would flow through the documents path and if invalid then through the error path.
Routing is achieved through processing group and Process routes. When an EDI document is received from the partner, it can be routed based on document or partner to a specific mapping process.
Boomi provides a powerful and easy-to-use visual mapping editor to convert source to destination formats. The target application can be an ERP such as NetSuite or SAP or a proprietary application requiring documents in XML or flat file format. Boomi supports XML, JSON, Flat file, DB formats in addition to EDI.
At EDI Support, we believe reusability saves time and effort and ensures better code maintenance. We always find opportunities to create reusable maps and map functions.
Boomi provides a large list of pre-built connectors to connect to specific software applications such as Sage, Quickbooks, NetSuite, Salesforce etc. It also provides technology connectors such as HTTP, AS2, DB, JMS, FTP, SFTP etc. Connectors help in faster development of integrations by import API fields and map them to EDI fields.
If you are working with EDI Support LLC, there is no need to buy or license more connections because our team is efficient with using the Boomi platform and helps you minimize any added cost. This is possible because we study the API documentation, identify the appropriate object and map EDI to API fields appropriately. We closely work with the SaaS application developers to ensure our mappings are accurate and the records are properly created. For proprietary applications, we map the EDI fields to the appropriate custom flat file or XML fields.
- Monitoring and Document Tracking
Boomi’s process reporting page displays all the integration executions. It shows the date and time of the execution along with the processing status if succeeded or failed or pending. In addition to the execution level tracking, the platform offers document and Trading Partner tracking to easily locate the document. Trading Partner tracking helps locate the EDI document based on various track parameters such as partner name and EDI IDs.
At EDI Support, we know how critical document tracking is for businesses so, we ensure capturing business numbers such as PO/Invoice numbers and technical numbers such as IDoc numbers at different stages so that the source and target documents can be easily located for troubleshooting.
Boomi provides two deployment models-
- Atom clouds – When all your integration endpoints are cloud. Atom
- On-premise – When you need to access resources behind the corporate firewall
It is important to ensure EDI data is translated properly and imported into the target application. At EDI Support, we like to understand your integration landscape in detail by asking the right questions, having multiple discussions with your ERP consultants. We suggest the right deployment model that will work for your business. We go a step forward in educating you on the pros and cons of each deployment model and help you take an informed decision.
