Over the years at DMS Group, we have helped several clients with their EDI [Electronic Data Interchange] implementations. Most solutions have been X12 based in either manufacturing or automotive sectors. The majority have been BizTalk Server based implementations, which has a stronger heritage in this space but recently Azure has rounded out its B2B services to enable closer equivalence in functionality. Regardless of which tooling you use, the one thing we guarantee you’ll need for your EDI implementation is appropriate logging.

Imagine you get a call from that important client. They want to confirm you received a critical 850 (Purchase Order). They claim they sent it yesterday but have received no acknowledgment. Frankly, you’d like to confirm that too. That order is important to your business. If you hadn’t already guessed it, this would be a bad time to find out that you really didn’t want the entire team depending on your overworked technology team to wade through verbose logs (that may or may not exist depending on what was configured) so that you can confirm a critical business receipt.

So what to do? First, absolutely  be sure to include appropriate EDI logging as part of any EDI solution delivery. By “appropriate” we mean is should include the ability for non-technical business users to easily search and view key EDI values that sufficiently enable their roles and keep the business smoothly running.

While you can start with the out of the box tooling in Azure and BizTalk respectively, they can be limiting and both tend to overly depend on your technology teams to access. Our recommendation is that most EDI business teams will likely need something more. A better options would be to consider tools like Kovai’s Turbo360 and BizTalk360 offerings. Remember a line of code you don’t write means a line of code you don’t have to support 🙂 That said, if you need it, you can always roll your own or get DMS to build you a custom coded logging and reporting solution. This maybe appropriate if you need more granular control or if you need it integrated into other software your EDI operators use daily.

At DMS we’ve helped install offerings like BizTalk360 as well as implement custom EDI logging solutions. If you are contemplating an EDI implementation or upgrade to existing implementation using Azure or BizTalk, then reach out, we can help. It is what we do and leveraging DMS team’s experience can both accelerate your time to value in the B2B space, as well as get you back to focusing on the business of business.