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Implementing EDI X12 Using C #

Our company sells medicines, we have a website on which we sell our products on the Internet. We work with suppliers who ship products to our customers when we receive a new order. We are currently handling this manually. We receive the order on our website and by phone / fax / e-mail to the supplier of the goods, send the products to the client and notify the delivery of information and notify the client.

This process has become difficult to handle recently. We are not using any B2B solution yet, but we need to implement an EDI solution. Our largest supplier uses EDI standards.

As far as I understand, the process will be as follows:

  • When we receive the order, we create an X12 document and send this document via FTP, SFTP or VAN.
  • Our supplier receives the X12 document and processes it. And send the invoice formatted as X12.
  • We get an invoice and analyze it in our system.
  • Our supplier sends shipping information formatted as X12 when they ship products to the customer.
  • We receive a delivery information document and analyze it.

I have some questions about this process.

  • The first and most important question: do I understand correctly? :)
  • What programs / tools do I need as a developer?
  • I know it is unreasonable to write your own X12 parser. We need an external application. But what application do we need? Do we need a large application like BizTalk? or some auxiliary libraries, such as
  • Our provider supports FTP, SFTP and VAN for data exchange, which connection should we choose? which one is easier and more understandable?

Sorry, I know I have a lot of questions :) Any help would be appreciated.

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3 answers

  • The description of your process looks fine. 1 / Following the order from your customer, you create and send the X12 850 (purchase order) to your supplier. 2 / Your supplier can send you X12 855 (purchase order confirmation) to confirm your order, this is interesting (business) information that you can "forward" to your customer. 3 / Finally, together with the actual delivery of the goods to your customer, your supplier will send you X12 856 (Notification / manifest of the ship), as well as X12 810 (Invoice). This is a fairly simple / classic EDI stream.

  • BizTalk will be a Microsoft-world recommendation, but for such a stream it can be quite expensive / oversized. If you are a .NET developer and want to do something yourself, generating 850, and reading 855, 856, and 810 is not as difficult as it might seem ;-) I personally developed a way to parse / serialize X12 to / from XML using scripts XSLT (which can be easily run from almost any programming language, including .NET), and I hope that it demystifies X12 syntax ;-) If you can share with MIGs (Message Implementation Guide) from your vendors, I can take a look and check Does my technique fit your needs? pits. The XML representation should be yours, following the data model of your application, and then should allow you to develop functionality around EDI documents, as usual!

  • See above; -)

  • You are lucky!!! Your provider supports FTP, it is the simplest, simpler / cheaper to implement! Think about how you do it today - for example, email - you don’t need high security ... What you need is AUTOMATION, please focus on this and do not be distracted by high security requirements! My advice; -)

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  • EDI is a very old standard for formatting data. I highly recommend that you verify that your provider does not support a newer standard, such as SOAP Web Services other than EDI.

  • Any programming language will work. Stick to what you are familiar with. In .net, the FileSystemWatcher class will be very useful.

  • BizTalk is a comprehensive tool and an expensive tool, so I will be tempted to look at the supporting libraries that you found first. EDI itself is quite simple - usually there are many comprehensive specifications for exchanging different types of data, but they all break down into the same general structuring of ASCII text.

  • FTP is the easiest but not secure. SFTP is almost as simple and secure. I am not familiar with VAN.

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you are looking at the open source bots edi translator ( http://bots.sourceforge.net ). Handles x12, xml, edifact, etc. And the messages you need.

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/945728/

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