EDI remains an indispensable technology that has evolved gradually over the last 50 years, but many EDI products are showing their age. EDI is at the heart of business transactions between corporations and their business partners, however, businesses have changed drastically since the EDI standard got its start in the military in the late 1940s.
Over the past several decades, the digital economy has become the economy and supply chains are global. Now is the time for businesses to keep pace with these changes, but to do so, it is essential to understand B2B processes and technologies and how to optimize them. In this blog, we will explore Boomi’s EDI Management Platform and how you can get started with modernizing your EDI network.
Boomi’s B2B/EDI Management Platform capabilities
Boomi’s low-code development platform allows companies to easily set up and manage B2B integrations, onboard partners, and integrate EDI with their existing processes and legacy applications. By breaking down traditional EDI silos and centralizing application-to-application, B2B, and API management, Boomi allows customers to maximize the return on their EDI investments. Increased transparency into EDI transactions allows for quick responses and improves interactions with partners.
Building on the success of its existing platform, Boomi has extended its set of EDI management features to further simplify and speed up how companies build and manage their trading partner networks. The enhancements include:
- Empowering Business Users for Operational Agility: Boomi enables business users to add, remove, or change specific parts of an EDI configuration to respond to business requirements, thus increasing business agility and responsiveness.
- More Reusable Components: Reusing common EDI components increases flexibility, reduces duplication, and simplifies updates. This is particularly valuable for companies with varied lines of businesses, semi-autonomous business units, or units acquired through mergers and acquisitions.
- Programmatic On-Boarding for Trading Partners via Boomi APIs: Boomi EDI simplifies and speeds up on-boarding, reducing the time required from weeks to hours.
- Trading Partner Reporting Portal: The new Boomi portal provides authorized users essential EDI documentation. Users can easily add filters to track documents or discover materials associated with a document’s lifecycle. Users can track documents by key number, PO number, customer number, or other document attributes.
- Trading Partner Management UI: The Boomi Trading Partner Management user interface provides a consolidated view of all trading partner components, making it easier for Boomi customers to find, configure, and deploy changes for those partners.
- Support for Multiple Trading Partners Per Process: Organizations can add their company’s profile for each standard in the Trading Partner component and be confident that the right standard will be used for each partner.
- Enhanced Value-Added Network (VAN) Support: Boomi has enhanced the ease-of-use and flexibility of its support for VANs—hosted service offerings that act as an intermediary between business partners sharing standards or proprietary data via shared business processes. Now, a single process can use multiple VANs.
- Support for Additional, Global EDI Standards: Boomi has extended its standards compliance with support from RosettaNet and Tradacoms.
Benefits of modernizing your B2B/EDI network
- Support Key EDI Standards: Achieve built-in support for a wide variety of traditional and modern EDI standards, including XML, X12, EDIFACT, HC7, RosettaNet, Tradacoms, as well as the ability to define custom standards.
- Industry Standard Connectivity: Support the full range of trading partner communications— AS2 (Drummond certified), FTP/Secure FTP, or Web Services using SOAP or HTML.
- Management of Trading Partner Framework: Set up and manage all trading partner components from one console to quickly find, configure, and deploy changes for your partner communications.
- Unified View of Partner Network Transactions: Easily generate detailed reports for any of your EDI transactions to simplify tracking, error resolution, and reconciliation.
- Rapid Partner On-Boarding: Quickly bring new partners into your network via the Boomi AtomSphere Platform, virtually eliminating data errors and reducing on-boarding time from weeks to hours.
7 Tips to help you modernize your B2B processes
To ensure a successful B2B platform and process modernization, keep the following tips in mind:
- Brainstorm with your team on how you can optimize your B2B process to support a better customer experience/user design learning approach.
- Choose one area to pilot, such as the supplier for a new product.
- Never do a “big bang” implementation for B2B-EDI in order to avoid the risks of business interruptions.
- Map the value streams; measure the time for each activity and start optimizing the most time-consuming tasks.
- Discuss what can be changed and brainstorm alternatives, such as implementing Boomi Flow and chatbots to interact with your partner ecosystem.
- Pilot Boomi as your B2B platform and leverage Perficient’s B2B/EDI, API, workflow automation, and data transformation experts to reduce your total cost of ownership and prepare for the next wave of business challenges.
- Keep an eye on trending B2B innovations.
Why Perficient
Perficient has a strong partnership and implementation experience with Boomi, offering key technologies which support IT modernization. Our expertise coupled with Boomi’s innovative cloud-native platform, delivers increased value, a low total cost of ownership, and drives better, faster outcomes, for our customers.
Learn more about our Boomi partnership here.
