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 is that EDI predates prevalent integrated business technologies – such as ERP, CRM, many database formats and other supply chain enabling technologies – making data transformation an important part 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, including:

• Enhancing the speed of processing transactions by removing manual procedures and automating connectivity

• Increasing the accuracy of exchanged documents by removing error-prone rekeying of documents previously received by fax, phone, or mail

• Reducing the cost of business and lowering inventory overhead costs by accelerating the processing of purchase orders and invoices

• Increasing productivity of office staff, allowing additional time for more profitable tasks

The Internet extends EDI’s lifecycle long into the futurePrior to the availability of the Internet as a secure means of transporting business transactions, companies hired the services of Value Added Networks (VANs) for EDI communication. The cost and overhead

associated with VANs prevented many small and midsize organizations from taking advantage of automated processing for EDI mapping. 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 are mandating the use of EDI over the Internet (EDI-INT) to reduce communications costs for themselves and their trading partners. LANSA Composer supports both alternatives – EDI over a VAN and EDI-INT. Conversion from EDI VAN to EDI-INT requires minimal effort and can produce significant ongoing savings.

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

Our EDI software helps you manage your trading partners‘ preferences by:

• Accommodating 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

• Configuring the automated responses that should be generated and managing exceptions

EDI mapping and translation for traditional EDI & EDI over the Internet

LANSA Composer facilitates computer-to-computer integration of business transaction documents with your applications. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for EDI mapping and enables automatic translation of EDI documents to and from your application databases. LANSA Composer hides the complexities of deciphering and assembling transaction sets, and handles any method of connectivity with your trading partners, including traditional EDI and EDI over the Internet.

LANSA Composer provides a drag-and-drop interface for EDI mapping and transforming data between different formats.

for EDI

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Execution features

• Automated processing from EDI format to and from the database

• Generation of requested functional acknowledgements

• Detailed error handling and reporting

• FTP, Secure FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, WebSphere MQ

Supported formats

• UN/EDIFACT

• ANSI X12

• Health Level 7 (HL7)

• SAP IDoc

• IATA PADIS

Powerful visual mapping tool

• Drag-and-drop, graphical user interface for transformation mapping

• Transformation maps to integrate business processes with transport and other activities

• Transform information between external and internal EDI formats as it is received or before it is sent

• Extract information from corporate databases to send as XML, EDI and other document formats to trading partners

• Transform incoming XML, EDI and other document formats, and write directly to your database for processing by existing applications, and much more

• Multilingual support for user interface

Administration and operations

• Browser-based console to monitor processing sequence logs and execution for errors and operator intervention

• Document Manager for monitoring inbound and outbound transaction documents

Configurations and trading partner definitions

• Configurations encapsulate the variable information required for common transport activities and for database connections

• Define source and target identification and addressing as well as security credentials

• Variable transport and database configurations and trading partner definitions provide maximum flexibility

• Create as many configurations as you need to define the information to connect or communicate with other parties

How does it work?LANSA Composer allows you to map EDI messages (including XML, flat files, Excel XLSX and Web services) against predetermined staging files for 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.

Our EDI software includes a drag-and-drop transformation and EDI mapper enabling the EDI implementer to visually design and execute mappings, and generate code for recurring transformations.

LANSA Composer simplifies transformation and EDI mapping by representing mapping components (XML and database structures) as documents that business analysts can inherently understand, without needing to know the intricacies of the data formats or the underlying code. The visual mapping helps organizations greatly reduce EDI mapping errors and allows you to perform the mapping in-house. Therefore, you can add and change mappings when required and bring on new trading partners quickly, without having to rely on third parties to write transformation code.

Your organization will quickly reap the benefits of exchanging information electronically – without increasing the costs or complexity of your existing infrastructure.

Full support for the ANSI X12 and UN/EDIFACT standards in LANSA Composer 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 EDI mapping design. You can even map from one format to another – e.g., convert EDIFACT files to an X12 format, or XLSX to EDIFACT for your global business partners. In addition to supporting the most current EDIFACT configuration files, LANSA Composer supports the EDIFACT versions for all previous years starting with standard 93a for trading partners with legacy systems.

Simplified EDI mappingWith LANSA Composer, EDI mapping 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). Our EDI software includes a configurable option to automatically connect matching child elements, as well.

You can also add data processing functions to your EDI 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 transactionsLANSA complies with 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.

Manage EDI transaction document processingLANSA Composer is equipped with a built-in transaction document database and a Document Manager.

The Document Manager provides the ability to monitor and interrogate inbound and outbound EDI transaction documents. The Document Manger console shows the transaction documents associated with each inbound and outbound document flow. Using the Document Manager’s search facilities, you can search the database for EDI transaction documents by a variety of criteria, such as by trading partner, status, EDI transaction document and content type.

Features