LANSA EDI Direct

Dynamic Electronic Data Interchange – Traditional EDI and EDI over the Internet (EDI-INT)

LANSA EDI Direct dynamically facilitates computer-to-computer integration of business transaction documents with your business applications. LANSA EDI Direct provides user friendly data mapping and enables the automatic translation of EDI documents to and from your application databases, while hiding the complexities of deciphering and assembling transaction sets, regardless of the method of connectivity with your trading partners.

Why EDI?

EDI standards have been the dominant format for eCommerce data exchange for decades, and give organizations a fast and accurate method of transmitting transaction data without the need for human interaction. However, as a message transmission paradigm, EDI is source format and system agnostic, and requires translation and purposing for delivery to proprietary systems at its final destination. The reality that EDI precedes such prevalent integrated business technologies – such as ERP, CRM, many database formats and many other supply chain enabling technologies – makes data transformation an important component of any EDI implementation.

Traditional EDI has long been the criterion for exchanging business transaction documents between trading partners including purchase orders, invoices and shipping notices. There is significant value for both parties involved in the transaction:

• Enhance the speed of processing transactions by removing manual procedures and automating connectivity with trading partners.
• Increase the accuracy of exchanged documents by removing error-prone re-keying of documents previously received by fax, phone, or mail.
• Reduce the cost of business and lower inventory overhead costs by accelerating the processing of purchase orders and invoices.
• Increase productivity of office staff, allowing additional time for more profitable tasks.

The Internet extends EDI’s lifecycle long into the future

Prior to the availability of the Internet as a secure means of transporting business transactions, companies hired the services of Value Added Networks (VAN) for EDI communication. The cost and overhead associated with VANs prevented many small and midsize organizations from taking advantage of automated processing. These VANs managed the communications aspect of the EDI process and generally charged one or both trading partners based on transaction volume. Now that these same transactions can be sent securely at no cost via the Internet, large companies like Wal-Mart are mandating the use of EDI-INT to reduce communications costs for themselves and their trading partners. LANSA EDI Direct supports both alternatives – EDI over the VAN and EDI-INT. Conversion from EDI VAN to EDI-INT requires minimal effort and can produce significant ongoing savings.

Today, EDI over the Internet (EDI-INT) is a popular means for business-to-business connectivity as more and more companies find the Internet as a less expensive alternative for computer-to-computer transaction integration.

LANSA EDI Direct enables supply chain collaboration

LANSA EDI Direct – The solution

LANSA EDI Direct employs a user-friendly Windows interface for all aspects of trading partner management, document translation mapping, transaction process execution, monitoring and error handling. The actual transaction processing can either be configured to run natively on an IBM i (System i, iSeries or AS/400) server or in a Windows server environment.

LANSA EDI Direct helps you manage your trading partners' preferences by:

• Configuring to the EDI standard and version your trading partners are currently using.
• Receiving trading partner information in the format you need to be stored in your business application database.
• Structuring how to source the information they need to receive from your database.
• Controlling the type of automated responses that should be generated and managing exceptions.

How does it work

LANSA EDI Direct allows you to map EDI messages (including XML, flat files, Excel 2007 and Web services) against predetermined staging files for seamless integration into your enterprise. Full support for the UN/EDIFACT and ANSI X12 standards means that you can seamlessly integrate this data with your internal systems to meet the changing demands of business partners and customers, internal requirements and global data transmission mandates.

LANSA EDI Direct includes a graphical EDI mapper for a highly intuitive interface enabling the EDI implementer to visually design and execute mappings, or even generate code for recurrent transformations.

Because XML and database structures employ human-readable data, developers can inherently understand these mapping components without knowing the intricacies of the data format(s) or the underlying code. This can help organizations greatly reduce errors by bringing implementations in-house, rather than relying on transformation code written by third parties. Your organization will quickly reap the benefits of exchanging information electronically – without increasing costs or the complexity of your existing infrastructure.

Full support for the ANSI X12 and UN/EDIFACT standards in LANSA EDI Direct allows you to use any of the over 300 transaction sets included in the X12 standard and the hundreds of messages covered by EDIFACT in your mapping design. You can even map from one EDI format to a different EDI format – e.g., convert EDIFACT files to an X12 format for your global business partners. In addition to supporting the most current EDIFACT configuration files, LANSA EDI Direct supports the EDIFACT versions for all previous years starting with standard 93a for trading partners with legacy systems.

Developing EDI Maps

Developing an EDI map is as simple as opening the EDI collection(s) and other data formats you wish to integrate in the mapping window, then dragging connecting lines from the corresponding elements in the source(s) and target(s). LANSA EDI Direct includes a configurable option to automatically connect matching child elements, as well.

You can also add data processing functions to your mapping to manipulate or filter data between the source and target data models. For example, you might want to perform logical comparisons, mathematical computations, or string operations – and make other modifications to the data.

Full support for VANs and Internet-based Transactions

LANSA complies with AS1, AS2 and AS3, which provides standardized connectivity with the trading partner community, and has vast experience with the most popular VANs including GSX and Sterling.

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