| # Electronic data interchange Electronic data interchange (EDI) is used to exchange business documents between two systems. For example, a customer sends a purchase order to a supplier through EDI after which the supplier responds by sending an invoice to the customer electronically. Therefore, EDI eliminates the transfer of paper copies of business documents. Many so-called external standards of these business documents are defined to give rules to the related business processes, the business document structure, and the content. In Europe, the UN/ EDIFACT standard is used; in the United States, the standard is called ANSI. Moreover, industry-specific standards are also used. For example, SPEC2000 and AECMA for aerospace and defense, and VDA/ODETTE in the automotive industry. ERP Enterprise has its own internal standard, called BEMIS (Baan Electronic Message Interchange System). ERP Enterprise uses the BEMIS standard to generate and read messages. All external standards can be translated into the internal BEMIS standard or generated from BEMIS by an EDI translator, using standard EDI message formats that are supported by your business partners. BEMIS In Electronic Data Interchange, you can specify business documents of various external standards, such as VDA, UN/ EDIFACT, Odette, and ANSI. Baan Electronic Message Interchange System (BEMIS) is the internal ERP Enterprise standard to which external standards are converted. Conversion of the internal standard to an external standard and vice versa is carried out by an EDI translator. BEMIS design principles A BEMIS business document must be designed following a predefined set of rules. If these rules are not met, the business document does not comply with the BEMIS standards. BEMIS - Content Although most of the EDI setup data is user-definable, ERP Enterprise also provides all required EDI data as default data. This information can be exported from the Enterprise Base Data company 050, or downloaded at http://edi.infor.com. The result is an ASCII file, called `defaults.edi`, that can be imported into the companies that use EDI. Setting up EDI Before you can use EDI, you must set up EDI data, such as master data, networks, codes and conversions, conversion setups, import and export data, communications, and messages. Receiving and generating EDI messages You can manually or automatically receive and generate EDI messages. History The history of incoming and outgoing messages is kept so that you can trace specific messages. |