Modernize EDI: Is Your Modern Business Running on Outdated Platforms?

Using the Aidant DI.Platform will unlock the full potential and maximize IT spend on licenses and other expenses for the EDI Team. Make your business teams more efficient and focused on business and not IT issues.

Does your EDI & data integrations team perform functions around B2B, A2A and ETL? Are those functions used to perform services such as data transformation (mapping), communications (sftp, As2, webservices, http etc.)? Is data from internal line of business systems such as SAP, PeopleSoft, Lawson, MS Dynamic and home grown ERP systems, sent and received between your Trading Partners (suppliers, customers)? Are you also connecting with external web-based systems such as Salesforce, WorkDay and services hosted on AWS and Azure Cloud infrastructure.

If the answer is “YES” to any of these questions, it is likely that you are using some bulky integration tools such as Covast, WebMethods, WebSphere, Sterling Integrator, BizTalk, Mercator or similar products. In rare cases, you may be using the old school custom application that you developed in the 1980's. Or you may be the courageous few using cloud based services to connect to the trading partners.

💡 See our recent blog post on using current cloud based integration platforms.

The Limitation of Traditional Methods

Traditional EDI tools such as those mentioned above have worked great for the last decade or so. However, given the current technological advancements and desire to be aggressively efficient, the traditional methods of data integration lack features that should be a basic requirement of any platform. These features can make or break any business, large or small, in the ever changing current landscape.

Having access to these necessary features can give companies critical tools to grow and operate efficiently. Allowing businesses to focus on their customers and suppliers rather than spending time (and budget) with their IT teams.

Critical Features for Data Integration Platforms

1. Ease of on-boarding customer and suppliers to trade and exchange documents electronically

2. Customize and implement customer rulebook requirements based on industry standard or custom data formats

3. End-to-end visibility of data coming in and out of the ERP systems

4. Real-time data warehousing / data mining of transactions to avoid dependencies on long-running/reactive ETL or batch processes that feed into business intelligence tools

5. Ease of connectivity with trading partners and ERP systems through harmonized implementation of various secure protocols

6. Search functionality for customer service and other business teams in one central location to get all the answers regarding data

7. Standardization and templating of change management and other development tasks and production support

8. Easy subscription of critical alerts and events that take place during data processing via email or text

Cloud-Ready and Scalable

Aidant’s DI.Platform is fully service oriented and cloud-ready. The DI.Platform offers an agnostic model that provides scalability over older solutions.

For example, connections to retailer rulebooks need to be perpetually updated. Traditional solutions require manually updating individual instances for each retailer connection a supplier may have. However, with Aidant’s DI.Platform these updates are replicated instantly across all business units and also all suppliers for a given customer. Retailers (ie. Amazon, Walmart, Target, Costco) also have rulebooks containing standards and formats in which distributors and suppliers must comply. When a new supplier wishes to do business with a new retailer, the retailer requires the supplier to be tested for compliance of its rulebook. The testing and implementations are streamlined with Aidant’s implementations. Suppliers using it can get to market faster and avoid vendor chargebacks and headaches presented by traditional platforms.

Get greater visibility, tracking, and tools to scale and support business with DI.Platform. Lower total cost of ownership and hidden costs that arise from unwanted production support, outages and vendor chargebacks that cost business their hard-earned margins. Don’t let data integration and EDI hold you back from doing business with your trading partners.

Apply integrations with greater confidence and information with Aidant.

Learn more about Aidant Technologies. http://www.aidant-tech.com/