Business Support Processes: the administration and control of the EDI environment
EDI Administration means establishing and maintaining internal business processes to enable EDI associations with trading partners. It is also the process of monitoring and insuring the integrity of EDI data exchanged with trading partners.
Transactions relationship
The Business Support function can involve several transactions which aid in the transfer of general business information between buyer and supplier, as well as guaranteeing the integrity of the flow of EDI information.
The buyer can send the Organizational Relationships (816) to the supplier to provide information regarding the buyer’s company and its stores, warehouses and other locations.
The Text Message (864) can be used to send general reports between buyer and supplier in the event that an existing transaction set cannot serve the need. The receiver of a transaction set may generate an Application Advice (824) to communicate any errors encountered within the receiving partner’s application systems. This transaction is designed to provide instantaneous acceptance information above and beyond the compliance checking provided in the Functional Acknowledgment (997). Information that is syntactically correct with regard to the standards does not insure compliance with the receiving application.
The Application Advice (824) provides a vehicle for communicating the results of application edits in a timely and accurate fashion. The types of errors to be reported and the associated message text are trading partner specific issues to be mutually agreed upon during transaction development. The final transaction used by the Business Support function is the Functional Acknowledgment (997). This is a special purpose transaction which is intended to verify the successful receipt of EDI transactions exchanged between trading partners. The Functional Acknowledgment (997) is transmitted back to a trading partner as a response to a previously received EDI document.
The Functional Acknowledgment (997) identifies the specific transaction it is verifying, and allows the sender to indicate whether that transaction was syntactically correct or incorrect. For example, a supplier would send a Functional Acknowledgment (997) upon receipt of a Purchase Order (850) to indicate whether the Purchase Order (850) is syntactically correct or incorrect. In most implementations, the Functional Acknowledgment (997) is automatically created by the trading partner’s translation software. Failure to receive a Functional Acknowledgment (997) in a timely manner, can indicate a problem or failure at some point along the communications path, and normally requires further research.
A syntactically correct EDI transaction does not guarantee that the transaction was processed by the receiver. Proper processing of an EDI transaction by a trading partner can only be verified by carefully coordinated testing procedures conducted as part of the initial implementation with that partner.
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