Why map documents?
Most of your customers and suppliers will expect EDI X.12 sent their way. Why? Standards have been created in the North American EDI market to facilitate the creation of various maps that help companies exchange business documents between systems which in turn eliminates manual handling and processing of documents.
Since your trading partners expect EDI X.12 documents (and EDIFACT in Europe), you need to find a way to take the files coming out of your internal systems and lay them out in a format that follows the standard. The same applies on the inbound process.
You have choices
Various offerings are available on the market to facilitate the mapping process. They are essentially grouped under two options, one where you can buy software, create and manage the maps on your own and another where you outsource the work to an integrator who prepares the maps and hosts them in their datacenter. InterTrade offers both those options through the EDGE suite of software products and through its SaaS offering. Each organization can decide which model to use according to their own corporate governance and IT architecture and expertise.
A word about SaaS
InterTrade’s Managed Service is a world class offering that can be used in a simple environment for a small size company that does not want to spend huge sums of money to create an integrated solution to trade electronic documents. It can be used in a more complex environment with larger scale applications such as Oracle or SAP to fully integrate supply or demand side processes with customers or vendors. InterTrade’s Managed Service takes out the complexity of coordinating connections and formats with multiple trading partners from your organization and delivers a turnkey project that allows you to focus on your internal business.
EDGE
The EDGE suite of products has been deployed to over 5,000 organizations over the past 15 years. Its architecture gives you the choice of integrated maps to a backend system or the use of pre-packaged semi-automated forms from which you can receive and send EDI documents with a host of retailers and large manufacturers. Ideal as an introductory product for small organizations , the EDGE Suite of software leaves you the option of building your own maps or have InterTrade build them for you and hand them over once completed so you can operate them on your own servers.