Very New to EDI - Just Starting 1

[warthog72]

Ok, I dont want to hold back the real discussions, but if someone could give me a real quick rundown on the following questions:

1. EDI POs and Invoices being received Asc X12, 4010 doc set. What tools can I use to actually read/parse this file/file type?

2. Internally we use Access and SQL Server. Is it possible to just use VBA to read and write these files or will I need some translater (ie, part of the tool to answer 1 above)?

Thank you very much for the info. I'm looking forward to becoming useful on these boards as my experience grows!

 

[voyageur]

Sorry for this tardy reply. I've been away for a while

1. You can read any X12 document (assuming it hasn't been encrypted) with any text editor. You just have to understand the layout of each segment. I do this when my translater has trouble. Alternately you can buy / write a translater. With the former you can map the data into a more usable form, with the latter, you need to really understand the document standard.

2. You can use VBA or probably any programming language to read or write EDI but once again, you really need to understand the standard. I was force to write a translator in RPG of all languages. Not nice but possible.


In my humble opinion, your best bet is to by a full EDI package. Good luck

 

[pwagner2]

Hi

We did what you are doing with VB6 and .net. The process was easy in some ways and hard in others. We cheated and used a tool from

http://www.edidev.com/

I would strongly recommend this for anyone trying to go it alone.

Paul

 

[ls62]

Hi,

Unless you have a big budget and lots of time for programming I would suggest that you look for a package that does the translations for you. Really, they've done all the legwork and handle multplie versions of edi documents, variances in segment and/or element layouts and data validation. Most of these have mappers that are great once you learn them and may have ability to write to access or at least create text flat files that you can control format and layout for importing. They handle multiple TP requirements and control setments automatically as well as archiving data.

Personally I think you ROI is much better on software that some has already written and maintained.

Lee

 

[warthog72]

Thank you all for you insightful replies. I based my final decision on TIME I just didn't have enough to do it myself. I'm currently using TrueCommerce's application/network and its going nicely. $ for $ and hour for hour - we're very pleased.

I did, on my own time, start writing a translater and found the header lines to be cumbersome and painful But workable.

Thank you again for all your help!