EDI and SAP integration – Part 1: Added Value beyond Mere Data Transfer

• Automotive
• Article

What benefits do you get when you integrate Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) with SAP ERP? This question was explored at an Aimtec-organised workshop with presentations by Business Development Manager Adam Heller and SAP SD Consultant Tomáš Pašek.

The first part of the workshop was focused on how EDI works in general and the current trends in EDI communication. Adam Heller emphasised that 27 years ago, Aimtec began to specialise in exactly this area, EDI, which was viewed at the time as a medium connecting business partners’ ERP or WMS systems. Today, however, EDI is a comprehensive field that can be expanded with many other processes. Especially when it is used along with SAP ERP, you can integrate your supply chain and increase the traceability of goods – and this is highly in demand at the moment. We can describe this advanced approach to data transfer as “added-value EDI”. Its main advantage is that it significantly speeds up intralogistics processes and eliminates paperwork and the manual transcription of delivery notes into the system. How can these benefits be achieved?

Service and support

In the realm of EDI, users often encounter an array of chronic problems that need to be addressed. The main troubles here include claims from clients – and especially automotive firms – due to erroneous ASNs, and a growing number of customer requirements, within either EDI or logistics overall. These problems often lead to slow responses from overloaded internal IT teams or external providers. In recent years, this has produced a trend of outsourcing the entire EDI agenda via SaaS to specialised providers that handle the majority of the activities connected with EDI, including onboarding, validation and reporting.

EDI as a Service is B2B communication with customers and suppliers through a variety of communication channels. Each message is accepted in a specified format (e.g. VDA, EDIFACT or ANSI) and is transformed into the format needed for SAP, such as IDoc, using a conversion process and then integrated into SAP. In a set-up such as this, the ERP user is practically unaware of the EDI, because the system is running in the background, and the user only sees the results presented to them by SAP. Data exchange in the opposite direction is equally reliable.

When discussing EDI as a service, it’s important to consider provider-side support. Aimtec offers 24/7 support with a 99.9% service availability guarantee.

Monitoring, validation and WebEDI

Aimtec has developed several security and verification mechanisms to provide for the optimal operation of EDI systems. One of these is the Message Monitor. “Sometimes you might see a customer casting doubt on the delivery of a particular message, for example an ASN. That’s why we enable our users to log in through our portal, find a specific message and verify whether and how it was accepted, converted and sent off to the system. Once you can be certain that a message has been accepted by the customer’s system, you are in a strong position for future negotiations,” Heller explained.

Another important tool is the Message Validator, which verifies whether an incoming message matches the agreed structure and contains all required fields, and it even lets you check the message contents against master data. This takes place before the message is sent off to the client’s SAP system.

Aimtec specialises in automotive and has rich experience with the requirements and standards of OEMs and their suppliers. Thanks to this experience, the client’s level within the supply chain is not a deciding factor. Customers from other sectors can also take advantage of the high standards that have been set in automotive.

For smaller suppliers that don’t have their own EDI solutions, there are still ways to communicate via EDI. For these “small-sized players” there’s a portal called WebEDI, which enables suppliers to see orders, dispatch goods and generate ASNs even if their ERP doesn’t support this function.

AI instead of paper

Adam Heller describes the ideal form of added-value EDI as the ability to integrate EDI into SAP, which accelerates logistics processes significantly. “An ASN doesn’t have to serve just as a foundation for planning; it can also significantly accelerate receipt in logistics. Partners send ASNs and prepare labels for materials, and thanks to that, you can easily perform receipt within SAP using a scanning app, without the logistics worker having to first take the delivery note, manually transcribe the data into the system and then put away the material,” said Heller.

He went on to emphasise that this scenario is ideal when suppliers communicate exclusively via EDI. However, even if they can be convinced to do so, not everyone will use this channel for all their communication. “For example, they will be transmitting ASNs and call-offs but will send invoices and other documents in PDFs, which once again demands manual transcription and creates room for mistakes. Why not use this as an opportunity instead? We can use the existing channel into the ERP system, deploy automatic data extraction and read the PDF document using artificial intelligence that converts it to IDoc,” Heller noted as a possible solution.

This method maximises efficiency and minimises errors in processes, thus attaining the true added value in EDI.

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