Electronic Data Interchange

Electronic data interchange (EDI) is used to process standard messages between two business partners and 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.

Many external standards of these business documents are defined that provide 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, such as SPEC2000 and AECMA for aerospace and defense, and VDA/ODETTE in the automotive industry.

LN has its own internal standard, called BEMIS (Baan Electronic Message Interchange System). LN 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, which uses 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 LN 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, LN 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.