Maia Samboy

Okay, and it is about that time to get started. Hello and welcome everybody. My name is Maia and I work at in marketing here at Eridani. And I’m joined by Dan, our CEO and Aaron, our chief architect. If you have not seen their lovely faces before, we’re here for the second installment of our EDI webinar series will be focusing on monitoring and alerting. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to put them in the Q and A box. It’s going to be at the bottom of this. Your screen at the toolbar is a little question mark and I am recording this session. I will email the recording to everyone afterwards. And if you have any questions after the fact, feel free to reach out to me at any time. We’re excited you’re all here. And with that, I’ll pass it over to Dan to get us started.

Dan Magid

Terrific. Thanks, Maia.

Aaron Magid

Great.

Dan Magid

Yes. And we’re really excited to give you this sort of preview for monitoring around EDI and other kinds of online transactions. I know I see in the audience that there are several people who are already Erdani Connect customers. And the good news for you guys is that this is all in Eridani Connect. So things, if you see stuff here that looks good and you’d like to do, let us know and we can help you get. And for those of you who are not yet Eridani Connect customers, there should be a lot of good content here, a lot of good information here, and again, if you have questions about how to get some of this stuff set up, a lot of it’s based on open source. Just let us know and we can talk to you about that as well. All right, great. So let me go ahead and share my screen here. And as usual, those of you who have been to our other presentations, I’m going to go through some PowerPoint slides, talk to you a little bit conceptually about what it is that that we’re talking about today and some of the reasons why you want to do these things. And then kind of the main event, Darren is going to go in and show it to you. So he’s going to take you through actually seeing how it all works and what it looks like in real life. And we have many customers who are already doing these kinds of monitoring operations. And so we’ll talk about some real world examples of how all this stuff works. So let’s talk a little bit about EDI and monitoring. So the idea here is to ensure that all of these communications are actually going to be reliable. So you know that when you generate EDI documents to send out, that you’re sending out complete documents, they have all the right information and that they’re, they’re getting to where it is that they need to go. And when, when documents are coming in, that you’re monitoring what’s happening with them, ensuring that you’re getting the right data coming in and that it’s secure and that in that it’s performing in the way that it needs to perform in order to support your business opportunity.

Dan Magid

So these are kind of the things that, what happens when you have problems with your EDI processing. So one of the biggest things is that a huge number of the transactions that many of our customers are involved with involve edi. And if EDI gets disrupted, then their whole business gets disrupted. So they can’t take orders, they can’t schedule shipments, they can’t register new users until they get the EDI system back up and running, or they’re putting lots and lots of people on doing the work manually. So they’re using lots and lots of people, resources which are expensive. It tends to be error prone. So if they lose that kind of EDI processing, it can cause significant disruptions to the business. And those kinds of disruptions can lead to lost revenue. You know, somebody’s trying to do business with you and they can’t get through to your system. They go and they find somebody else, you know, an alternate supplier, they go to, they, they go to work with somebody else, or they, they simply don’t do the business that they were going to do because they can’t, they can’t get that done. Or you’re trying to do business with somebody and you can’t get through to them. And so you, you end up losing, you end up losing the, the opportunity that business. And then there are all kinds of compliance rules around the data that you might be exchanging. Maybe you’re exchanging personally personal information, so you need to be able to protect that data or you have HIPAA compliance issues and you need to make sure that all of the data in those EDI documents that it’s protected. So you want to make sure you’re monitoring to ensure that everything that’s being sent and everything you’re receiving is in compliance with the rules, the things that you have to comply with. And resolving EDI issues can be extremely expensive. We have customers who tell us that when they get bad EDI documents, they have a human being who has to then go in and look at the document, figure out what data was wrong, reach out to their business, partner, figure out how to get the problem solved and then resubmit the document so it can significantly increase your costs if you can’t manage this properly. The idea of doing monitoring is that you can see these issues as they arise. So rather than having to go look into them, rather than waiting, you find out right away that you’re having issues and you can address them very, very quickly. So let’s talk a little bit about just the first topic, which is monitoring for errors. There’s some kind of an error in the EDI process. And those errors can be communication errors, they can be data errors, they can be silen sign on or authentication errors. There are lots of different kinds of things that potentially can go wrong in that EDI process. And again, you want to know about it as soon as possible. You want to be able to respond as quickly as possible to those errors. And these are just some statistics from the EDI Institute on the kinds of the amount of errors that are out there. So it’s not a trivial problem. Right? 5 to 15% of EDI documents contain errors. So you’re doing 50% of your business or 60% of your business through EDI could be a significant number of errors that are arising in those EDI documents. If you’re not actually doing some kind of automated validation, that number goes up to 20 to 30%. So if you’re not doing some kind of automated checking of the data that’s coming in, you actually are getting even higher error rates in the EDI documents. And then you see here up to 40% error rates when you’re first onboarding a new partner. So there can be very, very high error rates as you’re trying to get the process, all the issues ironed out as you’re bringing on new partners. If you have comprehensive monitoring, the numbers drop dramatically. The people who are actually doing monitoring are seeing 2 to 5% error rates in the EDI documents. So they’re still out there, but at least they’re getting notified about them and they’re responding quickly so the errors don’t get repeated. These are just some additional statistics of error rates by document types, you know, purchase orders, invoices, the different kinds of things people might be doing. And we’re seeing EDI customers in all different kinds of industries. So it’s in, you know, in supply chain, it’s in transportation, it’s in healthcare, it’s in insurance. We’re seeing, we’re seeing these EDI issues popping up in all different industries.

Dan Magid

And there are some real actual financial penalties. Associated with errors. If you have errors in your EEI documents, for example, Walmart can charge you $3 per carton if your Advanced Ship notice is in error. If you’ve done something wrong in the Advanced Ship notice, they can charge you for each one of those. We’ve actually also worked with several customers who are working with Amazon, working through Amazon Vendor Central. And if they’re sending information in an EDI document that doesn’t actually match the shipment, they get charged for that. And they, and we had a customer who told us that the charges that they were facing from Amazon ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So there was significant, significant money wrapped up in these, these charges. And one of the problems that they pointed out to us is they said actually it was Amazon who was wrong there. It their documents were actually correct. Amazon was simply misreading them. And so they were having this problem where the EDI documents that they were sending were being read incorrectly by Amazon. And they didn’t have a monitoring system that allowed them to show that, to show exactly what it was that their documents had and exactly what was shipped. And so what we were able to do is set up a monitoring system so they could prove to Amazon that no, we actually shipped you exactly what we told you we were going to ship. And they were able to save significant amount of money in those Amazon charges. And then there are lots and lots of fees that people charge. If you send them a bad document, they’re charged back fees. And then for you, if you’ve processed an EDI document incorrectly, maybe now we didn’t ship what we were supposed to ship and now we’ve got to do some kind of an overnight shipment or we’ve got to do something that’s going to be much, much more expensive than, than had we actually processed things correctly. So these are real costs and these are actually real examples from real customers. So the idea of monitoring for errors is you are proactively checking everything. So you have built into the monitoring system checks on the data to make sure that the data is correct. You have checks on the authentication to make sure that you know about all the sign ins and that everybody who signs in, you know what it is that they’re allowed to do, what, what it is they’re allowed to send you or if you’re signing on to somebody else’s system that’s all automated. And then you get notified if there’s a, if there’s some kind of an authentication problem, either again inbound or outbound, you get some kind of A notification so that you don’t keep trying and keep trying and keep trying, but rather you find out right away, oh, we’ve got a problem, let’s go fix it. You know, maybe we have a certificate issue, we have some other kind of problem, talking to our partner, let’s get that fixed right away. And then you have centralized reporting where you can go, you can see exactly what’s happening. And Aaron’s going to show you some of that. So I won’t talk too much about that because he’s going to actually show you what that looks like. And then from your centralized dashboard, you can actually go in and look at the error and say, okay, let me drill down and see exactly what’s happening here. Let’s look at the logs, let’s see exactly what happened in this particular transaction. Why did it fail? And then if you, if you want to get more advanced, you can actually set up some kinds of automated remediation, maybe using AI or some other kind of a way of dealing with the errors, and see if you can get some of that done automatically so it doesn’t require a human to go in and remediate the errors. And then you can constantly go back and look at the process. Since you have records of everything that’s happening, you have charts and graphs of all the transactions, you can say, okay, well are there things we could do to improve the process? Can we improve our response time so that we can respond much more quickly to our customers? Can we reduce the number of errors that actually make it to the back end processing system so that we’re finding those errors early in the process so you can actually look and see what’s happening and then make decisions about how to improve the process.

Dan Magid

So some of the advantages of real time monitoring is you can look at the syntax of the data, the formats of the data, and make sure they’re correct. You can look at the business rules and ensure that they’re being handled properly. What we have found is that a lot of customers have added their own business rules into the EDI documents. And so you need to make sure that those business rules are being followed. You may have different business rules for different business partners. You have to make sure that each one of those documents is being processed properly. So again, you can get alerted if there are any problems in automating those business rules. And then you can track both the inbound document that you receive and then the acknowledgement you sent out, or the outbound document that you’ve sent out and the acknowledgement that you Receive so you can track those and ensure that they’re matched up. And you have a central dashboard to go to to see all of the transactions, what’s happening with them, any errors, and to be able to troubleshoot the errors. And you can have alerts tied to pretty much any condition that you want to say. I want to know if somebody’s tried to sign on to my system too many times, or if I keep getting a bad document from a particular business partner, send me an alert, let me know about that so I can get that remediated as quickly as possible. So then monitoring for security talked about sign on issues. I want to know am I sending my data out properly? So if I need to be HIPAA compliant or SOX compliant, or I have PII rules or PCI rules, credit card processing rules, I want to make sure that we’re handling the data properly. And if any data is coming in or going out, that’s the not properly protected, I want to know about that. So I want to make sure that it’s happening and I get notified if something, if there’s anything amiss. And then access controls around the users, what is it that they’re allowed to do? Is somebody trying to send me documents that they’re not really authorized to send me? Let me know that right away. If somebody signs on multiple times, if somebody continually signs on and they’re not getting through, I want to know about that. Not just because it may be somebody, a bad actor who’s trying to sign in, but maybe it’s somebody who just can’t seem to get into my system and I want to know about that. And then I want to have an audit log so I can go in and say, here’s exactly who signed in, what it is they sent us, what it is we sent back to them. So I have a detailed audit trail. And then if there’s any kinds of strange activity going on, you know, maybe some kind of a bad actor trying to get into my system. There could be some other anomalous things going on. Somebody’s trying to send in executable data inside of the document. Something that I need to know about, I want to get an alert that there’s a potential attack, attack happening. And then looking at all the processes and making sure that we’re complying with whatever our audit requirements are. So some of the things that from a security standpoint, data protection, financial data, PII kind of data encryption of all the traffic going back and forth and ensuring that it’s encrypted and then Just making sure that I get notified if there’s any kind of an access control issue, if somebody can’t get in or somebody is trying to get in who shouldn’t be, so that I can look for any kinds of threats that may be arising.

Dan Magid

And then for performance, you want to make sure that everything that I’m doing is performing up to the requirements of my customers. So, you know, am I successfully sending out the documents? Am I successfully processing the inbound documents? How much time does it take me to process those documents? If there’s an error, how long does it take me to respond? And, and what are my SLAs? Do I have, do I have service level agreements with my business partners? And if so, am I meeting those service level agreements? This could be really, really important because a lot of customers, a lot of companies actually track vendor performance and you get dinged if you’re not performing well enough. So you want to be able to see am I actually performing well? And I’m performing well enough for each of my customers. So these are just some of the things that we’ve been told about customers that they face where, you know, on a purchase order, if you don’t respond within 20, 24 to 48 hours, we’re going to just simply cancel the purchase order. So it could be, it could just go away. If I’ve got an advanced shipment notification, you better make sure that I get that well in advance of the shipment arriving at my location so I can have the appropriate resources available there to receive the shipment. If you don’t do that, you can get dinged for that. And a lot of companies now are keeping scorecards of their vendors and making sure that they’re performing appropriately. And if they’re not, you get, you get dinged on your scorecard if you, if you don’t get your invoices out in a timely fashion. So if you’re not getting invoices out to your, your customers quickly enough, probably want to know about that because it can delay the tape, the payments that you might be getting. And then this is inventory update. This is something we’ve heard from several Amazon partners where they say if I sell something through Amazon and I can’t fill that order, there are significant penalties that I have to pay for that. In fact, you can even get kicked off of Amazon if you do it often enough. You want to make sure that you are getting all that information real time. And if there’s ever delays, you want to get notified. You want something to tell you that, hey, we’re having a problem here. We’re not getting these updates quickly enough and you need to take some action. So you know, our, what, what is our success rate? Are we, how, how, how, what percentage of our transactions are handled or handled successfully? Are we meeting our, our, our, our service level agreements? Are we, are we staying up? You know, because the, the, if the EDI system goes down, it can be incredibly expensive to the business and, and you can actually bring down your business partners as well. So you want to make sure that you’re keeping all that stuff up and running so that you get good scores from your, from your business partners.

Dan Magid

And then finally just monitoring for compliance, you’re making sure that you are logging everything that happens and you can see it so you have a place to go where you can see, okay, yeah, everything’s good. Looking at my history of transactions, we’re handling them in a timely fashion. Everything’s working or things are not working. We’re having problems and making sure that when I get audited, if I have a SOX audit or a HIPAA compliance audit or a financial audit, some other kind of audit, make sure that I have all the data that they need so they can come in and they can see, okay, yeah, here’s how you process all the transactions, here’s how long it took, here’s the errors that occurred, and here’s how you responded to that error. You’ve got all of that information in so that when you have an audit you can, you can see it all and you don’t have to go through digging through documents to try to, to try to figure this out. It’s all very, very visible and easy to access.

Dan Magid

So again, the idea is you want to implement this comprehensive monitoring. So you’re monitoring all the transactions, you’re monitoring everything that happens. And what’s great about the monitoring is that that means you don’t have to pay so much attention to it. You can simply go look at the dashboard and see where things are or you will get alerted if there’s something you need to know about. You’ll get an alert so you don’t have to worry about it and check on it. It’s happening for you automatically that things are available. You can look at it, you can get alerted about it. And all of the compliance kinds of reporting, all of the compliance logging, all of that is being done for you automatically. So you can look into the system and if you need to do things to optimize your performance or to improve your performance with your customers, you can do that. That’s just kind of an overview of what you can do with monitor and why you might want to do monitoring and what the, what are the things that it can do for you. And again, you’re going to get these slides. So if you need to talk to anybody about saying, hey, I need some resources or I need some time to be able to set up monitoring, say here, look, these are the reasons why we need to do this. So now I’m going to go ahead and turn things over to Aaron. He’s going to talk a little bit about in the real world, what does this monitoring look like. And again, we support all kinds of different dashboarding systems because, because we support industry standards and Aaron’s going to talk about this. But because we, we put, we actually stream all of our log data out in standard formats, you can actually use any dashboarding system you want. But Aaron will talk a little bit more about that. So Aaron, I’m going to turn things over to you,

Dan Magid

assuming you’re still there.

Aaron Magid

I apologize. Can you hear me now?

Dan Magid

Yes.

Aaron Magid

Headphones decided to die. So that, that’s great. Right when it’s time to.

Aaron Magid

Cool. Great. Well, yeah, Dan, thank you for that introduction. I appreciate that very much. I think that was a really good start here. So, yeah, what I want to do is take you guys through some of the things that, a real world example of some of the things that, that Dan was just talking about here. And, and one point that I really want to hammer home before we really jump in here is Dan’s last point about the industry standards. You know, one, one of the really cool things that happens when you are working with industry standards is you get, you get to take advantage of this sort of pyramid of technology, right? What happens is people keep on adding layers to this technology and when you’re working with the industry standards, you get to take advantage of all of these new things that are happening in the industry in the observability space and, and in other spaces without really having to honestly do all that much to take advantage of them. And I’ll talk about what that actually means in terms of industry standards. But again, it is critical, especially with the speed at which technology is advancing these days, especially because of AI and those things. It is so important to make sure that we’re using industry standards. Again, I’ll elaborate on that in a bit. So first of all, before I jump into to really showing something, I want to just cover one concept here, which is that when we talk about.

Dan Magid

Hang on, Aaron, just one thing before I think I didn’t mention the beginning. But if you have questions, please go ahead and put them into the Q and A while Aaron’s talking. I’ll be monitoring that and if I can answer questions while we’re going, I will and if not, we’ll have some time at the end hand for, for Aaron to take those questions. But yeah, please feel free to put your, your questions in the Q A. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Aaron Magid

Yeah, great. So when we talk about monitoring, there’s, there’s really three categories but two major ones that you’re going to be looking at when you actually get into monitoring a system like this one is we talk about high level metrics, right? Which is, which are numeric values, summary values related to how our system is processing. Things like total number of documents that I’ve processed, right. Total number of errors, the number of 850s I’ve processed, right. The number that this trading partner has done, those kinds of things, CPU usage, processing times, you got those sort of high level metrics. Then we have detailed logging data which is another category of data that we can get out of our system which is much more granular. Right. Things like given on this EDI transaction that I was processing the specific document, what was wrong with it that caused to be rejected, right? Those kinds of of data points are going to be in our log data. And when we work with these two types, what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be shipping them out in industry standard formats. For logs, that’s Prometheus or Open Metrics and, or I’m sorry, For metrics that’s Prometheus and, or Open Metrics. And for logs we’re going to use a metrics collector that’s able to handle our, our JSON formatted log data that comes out of our system and put it into a dashboard. So let me show you what that looks like. I’m going to share my screen here so you can see this. All right, so this here is my EDI dashboard for my Aerodynamic Connect EDI processor. And looking through this, there’s actually a lot more data than I have on this screen. But what I’ve done here is I’ve put together a couple of, a couple of visualizations that are useful to me. Right? So for example, this dashboard is refreshing every five seconds with the latest data from my EDI processor. You can see these numbers ticking up periodically. And what it’s telling me is, okay, we’ve processed 547 EDI documents. Since I reset the system, I reset it right before we started this, this presentation, I’ve had 63 error documents, right? 63 error transactions. Right. So these are the numbers that I’m going to want to watch while I’m working with my system. And I can also see in the same view, I can see all of my logs that are going on. That’s all of this data down here, which I’ll jump into in a minute. I can see the list of successful documents, I can see the list of failed documents, and I can pull out what’s actually going on in my system. And I’ve got some other metrics here too, that are going to cover things like how many documents are we processing per minute, how is that changing over time, and how much data am I transferring, how big are my documents, what’s my processing time? And of course, down at the bottom, who are my most active trading partners? Right. So all of this stuff is available to me at a glance. I don’t need to go into, you know, some specific application somewhere. I don’t need to go into my 5250 to get it. I don’t need to go into any special places to do this. I’ve got a centralized dashboard where I can see all of this. And this dashboard has a couple of really powerful things, again, leveraging those industry standards that it’s able to do. One of the things that is a fairly recent innovation in this technology, but again is built on using industry standards, is the ability for this dashboarding system to interact with AI assistants. You know, I’ve got this dashboard here. If you’ve been to our webinars about EDI and about monitoring, you’ve probably seen this dashboard before, right? We’ve been doing this, this, these dashboards for a long time. But one of the really powerful things here is that because behind the scenes, this dashboard is using Prometheus metrics, or also known as Open Metrics, because it’s using an industry standard for actually tracking the data. That means everybody out there, at least every major player, knows how to work with this data. Right? If I have my metrics data in a proprietary IBMi application or something like that, If I have, you know, it in, in a platform that I’m using and it’s only in there, it’s going to be a lot harder to pull it out and get into these types of systems. If I have it in an industry standard, I can start doing some really cool stuff. So I want to take you through some of the things that, that, that we do with this. What I’ve done Here is I have a GPT instance that I’ve been using that has access to all of this data. So to give you an example, I’m going to come in here and I’m going to say, how many EDI documents have I processed?

Aaron Magid

Ask it. And it’s going to go in there, it’s going to check my system metrics and it’s going to say, ah, you’ve processed a total of 62,000 EDI documents on this particular instance that it’s talking to with eight errors, Right? That’s, that’s what I’m seeing in here. It’s going to give me a breakdown by type, right. So my assistant knows exactly what’s going on here. And if you notice it actually mentions this error rate is extremely low. Right? This isn’t, this is an abnormally low error rate for, for this type of system. Right. But I want to give you a real use case for this kind of thing. Right? Okay, cool. I got GPT talking to my metrics. This is actually a really powerful point because I can now give an interface to various different users for what they need to do their jobs, right. I talked with a lot of EDI developers in my work. I talk a lot of EDI consultants and a lot of the questions that, that I get from them are things like, okay, I’ve got a business user and they need to make decisions about their trading partners, but they don’t understand the underlying technology, right? So I get a question, for example, from a business user, they ask me something like which trading partner has sent me the most purchase orders, right? They’ll give me something like that. And I have to go through and sift through data in my EDI processing platform and count through things or run a report to try to get the information. What’s powerful here is I can go over, over to this assistant, I can give this to my business users and I can say, ask it what you want. You don’t need to ask me. You don’t need to get into my proprietary platform and get into run reporting and you know, wait for things to come out. You just say which trading partners? I mean those purchase orders, I’m curious about that. And it’s going to come back and it’s going to say, you’ve actually got a tie here from the top two, right? These are our, our trading partners that are giving us the most. And then by the way, here’s, here’s a couple other ones that are on here that are, that are high up. And by the way, if you’d like I can show you the Trend over time, for example, the last 30 days of POS to see if they’re the consistently the top or if it’s just, or if it’s just what’s happening right now. Right. And that is all possible because these metrics are being exposed in a standard format. Right. We’re conforming to industry standards religiously. Right. And that’s what’s allowing this type of thing to happen. When GPT gets to the place where it’s able to handle this kind of data, which it now is, is a recent thing, it can then jump in and start grabbing this information. I’ll give you another one, one that I get from, from system administrators a lot. What is my average processing time for an EDI document? Right. I’ve got a system administrator who needs to jump in and see how’s my system doing. Right. Am I processing these documents in an effective manner? Right. And we can see here, it says, here’s your average processing time. We’re about, about 250 milliseconds, about a quarter of a second. Is that good or does it indicate a problem?

Aaron Magid

It says it’s well below what’s typical in production EDI systems. Great. I love what I’ve got. Right. Normal mid tier systems are going to give us 500 milliseconds to 2 seconds. Slower systems are 2 to 10 seconds. I’m in the high performance zones, no signs of bottlenecks. We’re doing great. Right. These are the kinds of things that we can do with this technology. Right. I love using AI personally. Right. If any of you have seen any of my presentations, right. I, I love this stuff. I think that you can get incredible value out of these tools. And again, one of the key points is let’s get our data into a standard system so that we can start taking advantage of this. Right. This tool allows me to get the right data to the right people in a format that they can actually understand. Right. My business users can go in and they can say who’s the most active trading partner and who’s the least active. Right. Has anyone dropped recently? Have we seen a reduction in business from a particular partner recently? Are there any trends that are indicating they might be maybe searching around at other partners? They might be looking around. We might have a customer that’s in a red zone that we need to look at. Right. I’ve got my system administrator. How’s my system doing? Getting a quick query, no need to go through, sift through lots of data, lots of reports. Or proprietary interfaces. Just ask the system, how are you doing? Right? That’s, that’s how we want to set this up. Right? We want to get this ready so that everyone has what they need and we’re not having to go into all these, you know, proprietary systems, jump through all kinds of hoops, learn all kinds of new things, you know, that, that we’ve never used before to try to get to a base functional state with these tools. So hopefully that’s making sense from there. Let’s, let’s jump into the detailed data here again because, you know, I, I, I am not one to say that that AI will replace everything. You know, there are still use cases for, for things like dashboards. I’ve seen some very powerful usages of this technology where I’ve worked with some groups where they have a screen up, you know, a, a TV screen up in their office where they’ve got this dashboard just sitting there all day, refreshing every five seconds. Right. So they can see, you know, they can see alert conditions as they come up. Let’s talk about what we would do with some of this high level data that I got from my, my EDI copilot here. If you remember up here, it mentioned that I had some errors in my data, I had some error documents earlier in my conversation. Let’s take a look at what those are. Right? This is where we get into log data and where this gets very powerful. If you remember I mentioned all of that detailed log data is in this system, right? So for example, if I pull from my system here, I can see every error transaction that has happened in my system and what I’m going to do is I’m going to go over here and I’m going to grab the transaction ID for a particular error. Every document in the aerodynamic EDI system gets a unique identifier that is universally guaranteed to be unique. Take that. I’m going to put it up in this list and what that’s going to do is it’s going to show me on my dashboard. Here’s exactly what happened with that particular document. So let’s look at what this particular document says. This particular document says that we received a document and I know exactly when that happened. We were, we started validating and it ran into a problem. So it marked the document as invalid, it moved it to a quarantine folder and then sent a notification out to our team to go check on that document and make sure that everything’s okay. Because this was a structural error in the document. And how do I know that because in my log it says the document validation failed and it says the SE segment indicates an in an incorrect count, right? So if you notice here, this system is giving me an intelligent next step in the process. There are some EDI errors where we want to notify our team and there are some, where, okay, it might just be one bad trans, one bad transmission, right? For example, if I get a document where I get, you know, an invalid weight, let’s say, for something that might just be a data problem, right? Somebody’s got a bad record in their database, okay? They put an extra, somebody typed it in with an extra zero and it created a problem, okay? That’s one type of issue. This issue, though, this is sending a notification to my team because this type of error is a structural error in the EDI trans transmission, right? If you get a document where you’ve got an SE segment that’s got an incorrect count in it, that means that the document was generated in a fundamentally invalid way, right? So I have to make sure that my system is able to understand the difference between those two different scenarios, right? One is a case where I just need to let my trading partner know, hey, you sent me an invalid weight for something. You might want to check your database, make sure that it’s right. Another case is you are generating fundamentally invalid EDI documents. We need to look at this, we need to sit down and fix this, right? You’ve got a problem here, right? So these are very important distinctions. And, and the key point here is I have access to look through all of this and make sure that I’m getting the information I need. Now, I want to take this one more level because everything that I’ve talked about here is from a human perspective. It’s, it’s. Everything that I’ve talked about here is what I’d call sort of semi proactive, meaning our team can be proactive about things with what I’ve told, with what I’ve said so far, but the system itself hasn’t been. What do I mean by that? I can jump in and look at my dashboard. I can jump in and I can talk to my EDI copilot and I can ask it questions about how things are going. But what about when there are errors in the middle of the night? What about when there are errors when I’m on vacation, right? What about when, when I’ve got a critical issue with a trading partner and I need to know right now, not wait for my admin to go into the dashboard and notice that there’s A problem, but actually see it now. Now, now, right now there’s a critical problem, right? My biggest trading partner just had a PO not go through. I need this to be fixed. Absolutely. Right now. Well, that’s where again, the standards become really important because we can use standard alerting systems, right? So in this application, I actually have an alerting system. What I’m going to do here is I’m going to simulate an error condition. What I’m going to do is I’m going to start cranking up the EDI rates in my system. Now this is a real scenario that we got from a group that we were working with where they had a trading partner with a bug in their system that caused them to send a whole lot of transactions in an extremely tight loop, right? So if you notice a second ago I had. I forget how many was. It was a couple hundred EDI documents processed. Now I’m at 12,000, right? If I wait for the document for the dashboard to refresh again, in a couple of seconds, you’re gonna see, oh, Now I’m at 23,000, right? I’m getting an absurd flow of documents coming into this application, right? We’re talking like thousands of documents per second that are coming into this system, which, you know, in EDI systems is, is very unlikely. And you can see in my dashboard, right, If I’m looking at this, I can see this, this shape in my, in my chart here is, is definitely indicative of a problem, right? We were low and then we went through the roof, right? Now, critically, this is where this becomes very important.

Aaron Magid

I’m going to jump over to Slack, which is what my company uses for internal company communication. Aridani uses, uses Slack internally. All of our messages come through here. What I want to point out here is at 12:38pm and 42 seconds today, I got a message from the system that says, hey, we’re getting way too many requests into this system, right? And it came in and it said, by the way, you were getting at this particular point, your average had gone up to 347.99 requests per. Per. Per minute or per second. I can’t remember which, which. What’s the time frame on that? But this is coming in and it’s saying, hey, something’s wrong, right? I’ve got a problem in this system and it’s proactively alerting me to that problematic state, right? So this dashboard is not just getting it set up so that I can go in and look at what’s going on. It’s not just so that I can go into my EDI copilot and ask it about what’s going on. It’s actually coming out and it’s saying hey, you need to look at this. And this system just for reference supports notifying to basically anything. It supports Slack, it supports teams, it supports email, it supports text messages, it supports pager duty if anybody’s using that. It supports putting tickets into your JIRA system. It supports making webhook calls to custom systems. It’ll do basically whatever you need to make sure that the right people are being notified about these conditions. Now I’m not going to wait for this. I’m shutting off the, the process that I just set in there that was doing that, that tight loop. So the graph should start leveling off in a second because I, I stopped doing that. And what, what’s actually gonna happen? There’s gonna be another notification. It’s gonna take it a few minutes so I won’t show it here, I’ll show you an example from a prior run. Eventually it will come back and it’s gonna, and it’s gonna say ah, this error condition has been resolved. We are now back down below the threshold. We are now in a safe threshold. The error appear handled, right? It’s going to come back. It’s going to notify me again when that happens. Now again it does that. It’s fairly, it’s, it’s much more conservative about its resolution notifications than the error notifications because it wants to err on the side of, of notifying you when something comes in. So it’s going to be a couple of minutes before it lets me know that it usually takes about five minutes for it to, to let me know, hey, okay, it’s been resolved. We’re confident now. But that is something else that it’s going to do. It’s going to let me know when that’s done. So just to wrap up here, I hope that was useful. What, what we’re looking at here critically right is, is three key places. One is my dashboard that’s showing me my high level metrics and allowing me to look at errors. I’ve got my industry standards that allow me to take advantage of the latest technologies including AI assistance with my, with my metrics, with my reporting up to the business level or the IT level. And I have proactive alerting that’s able to make sure that I am able to respond to errors very, very quickly, right? Not wait for my trading partner. You know, I don’t have to wait for my biggest customer to call my boss and say, hey, something’s going wrong. You know, in this integration, I know about it the moment something starts to happen, I know within seconds so that I can deal with it hopefully before I get that call and before my, before my boss is breathing down my neck to, you know, to resolve the issue. So hopefully that gave you a view of what you can do with this, what you can do with these technologies. And yeah, I, I, I hope that it was useful and I’ll pass it over to, to Dan to close us out and open things up for questions.

Dan Magid

Great. Thanks Aaron.

Aaron Magid

Appreciate it.

Dan Magid

I was able to answer some questions I know as we were going. So if you do have some questions, please put them into the Q and A. But just kind of to wrap things up. Let me just share this last thing here, which is a quote from the, this is from the EDI Institute, which is. By implementing robust EDI monitoring strategies, organizations can mitigate the risks of process processing failures, ensure data security, maintain regulatory compliance, optimize operational efficiency. This unlocks significant cost savings, enhance business agility and strengthen data exchange capabilities. So basically they’re saying that by doing this kind of monitoring, you can perform better with your customers, you can generate more revenue and you can control costs better. So hopefully you’ve seen some of that from what Aaron showed today. And I don’t see. Maia, do you see any, I don’t see any other questions coming in at this point.

Maia Samboy

I don’t think so. I don’t see any others. If you do think of a question afterwards again, feel free to reach out. I’m happy to pass those on to Aaron and Dan.

Dan Magid

And then Maia, as far as follow up, you’re going to send out the recording and the PowerPoint slides or what’s happening with that?

Maia Samboy

Yep. Tomorrow morning you should receive an email with the recording as well as PowerPoint slides. And the link to this recording that you’ll receive is the same as the registration link for our next session. So if you would like to register for our next session, that is going to be September 25, same time, same place. And the link will be, the registration link will be there with the recording. So hopefully y’ all can join us next time. We are very excited about this and excited everyone could join us. And thank you so much, Jan and Aaron. That was awesome.

Dan Magid

Yeah. And just one, one last thing, again, just a reminder that, you know, for those of you who are customers, you know, if you want to try working out, set, setting some of this stuff up, you know, reach out to us let us know and those who are not. You want to talk about this further and how you might be able to take advantage of this again, feel free to reach out to us and and we can set up a session to talk about it.

Maia Samboy

Well, thank you so much for coming, everyone. Look out for that email from me and hopefully we will see you September 25th, noon Central.

Dan Magid

Great. Thanks, everybody.

Maia Samboy

Have a great day, everyone. Thank you.

Aaron Magid

Thank you all. Bye. Bye.