How to be cost-effective and minimize the risk in overall communication and standard processes? The answer would be an EDI studio that simplifies communication and collaboration between companies, their customers, and trading partners through electronic data interchange (EDI).
Many companies use EDI Studio to make information exchanges with customers and suppliers more efficient, more dependable, and easier to administrate. The solution helps them control the costs and minimize the risk in everyday processes and communications.
The many possible usage scenarios for EDI Studio include:
- Optimizing supply chain through automatic ordering.
- Exchanging inter-company orders and other documents across different D365 environments.
- Sending prices and product updates to point-of-sale systems in a retail chain.
What Are the Reasons to Invest in EDI Studio?
As To-Increase EDI Studio supports Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations data model and promotes low-overhead administration with standard configurations, tracking, and control capabilities, there is a slew of good reasons to invest in EDI Studio.
EDI Studio helps you optimize everyday business activities, such as providing:
- More efficiency in processing a large volume of orders
- Validated sales orders and purchase order confirmations
- Streamlined inter-company transactions
- Supported 3PL warehousing
You can use EDI studio to exchange EDI messages with your business partners, and you can send and receive those as a buyer or a seller.
EDI studio works with flows both from Sellers' and Buyers' point of view.
These flows are made of messages, such as:
- Order
- Acknowledgment
- Confirmation
- ASN (Advance ship notice)
- Invoice
Let's break down the steps and processes to configure this flow on EDI studio.
EDI Studio: Understanding the Process
Starting from the order creation, EDI Studio allows the user to be very flexible. Consider the example of a message where we are mapping data into a staging table.
Users can decide whether to use their own staging table, or to use BIS staging table.
The purpose of using a staging table is to store data temporarily, and it's used to check and validate information coming from customers and vendors.
EDI Studio already contains some predefined validation rules, for example, to check the quantity, prices, and many other fields, to avoid the insertion in the system of incorrect or inconsistent data.
These validation rules are built-in classes; this means they can easily be extended to meet every business process or rule.
(It is even possible to create a validation class from scratch.)
On EDI Studio, you can then setup EDI journal validations; these validations can be applied to different levels such as Legal entity, Customers, Vendors, Warehouse or even groups (Customers or Vendors).
On the journal validation form, you define which validation rules apply to flows.
These document flows include items such as orders, confirmations, acknowledgments, etc.
When we apply validation rules to a specific flow, we can then decide per customer what to do if validation fails; therefore, there are mainly two options:
- Stop: The EDI message will stop its execution
- Continue: Even if the validation fails, the execution of the message will continue anyway
Once we've set validations and selected to which level, we want to apply this, we can then proceed to run the first message that will put the data in the staging table.
The second step now is to process the information that is in the staging table, validate it (through the validation rules) and migrate this data to the D365 tables.
EDI Studio gives us the possibility to visually see the data stored in the staging table, through specific forms, based on the type of document we are working with (sales order, inventory order, confirmation). So, we can also check the documents manually if required.
We can then proceed to execute the next message, that will put data inside D365.
When your order is now inside D365, EDI Studio (together with Connectivity Studio) will allow you to create your own flow of processes, so you can either use the standard process (the messages that are present in the tutorial of EDI) or customize the messages, to meet your business logic.
Some document flows such as Confirmation or Acknowledgment that require to send out a document back to the customer (if it's a sales order) or back to the vendor (if it's a purchase order) allows you to create the exact format of the document that the other party will accept.
An EDI Studio can support three main EDI scenarios. Let’s understand the various EDI integration types:
Direct EDI integration
We can send back EDI document directly to the other party; this means that we will adopt the EDI standard used by the customer (EDIFACT or X12).
Indirect EDI integration
We will send back the document in whatever format we prefer. And in between the sender and receiver, we will find an EDI broker that will translate the document in the expected format of the receiver or sender.
Hybrid EDI integration
EDI Studio also supports hybrid integration. This scenario will be applied in case you agree with the other party for some specific document which you want to send. The document is sent directly (without any EDI broker in between); but, for others, you need to have an EDI broker in between.
To-Increase EDI Studio will help you to implement your EDI processes within Microsoft D365. However, it's just not about implementation. Let the solution reap benefits for you by streamlining and simplifying the communication with your customers, vendors, and trading partners.
James Smith
Jim Schwab
