Maia Samboy

Hey, looks like it is about starting time. Hi everybody. My name is Maia Samboy. I work in marketing here at Eridani and I’m with Dan Magid, our CEO and Aaron, our chief architect. And we’re super excited to have you here. Today we will be talking about rapid partner art onboarding and this is the first installment of our EDI webinar series. Our next one will be about monitoring and our third and final installment will be about planning your EDI future. So make sure you keep an eye out. I will put the registration link in the chat for those webinars as well. If you haven’t already registered. This session is being recorded so please keep an eye out for an email from me with the recording at the end of the session. And if you have any questions, please feel free to enter them in the Q and A box that is at the bottom of your zoom screen here. We will also leave a little bit of time at the end for questions, so if you want to wait till then, totally fine as well. And yes, with that I think that’s all I have. I’m going to turn it over to Dan to get us started. And again, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. I will put my email in the chat as well. Thanks everyone.

Dan Magid

Great, thanks Maia. Yeah, we are very excited about this topic because EDI is really something that was driven by our customers. For those of you who know us, and I’ve noticed that there are several of our customers here. So those of you who know us, you know that we were in the API and integration business. So we’ve been doing this for quite a while. We have a lot of IBM I customers who are using our solutions for doing API based kinds of integrations. But they started to ask us about edi so they said, you know, we’ve got this other thing that we do and it’s just an integration now. It’s a very specific kind of an integration with very specific formats for how things are done. But it is an integration. Could you help us with that? Could you help us do that? And a lot of that was driven by some of the changes that were happening in the EDI market, in the IBMI market space. And so people said, can you help us do this? And so we looked into it and, and a Couple of things that we were doing really led to a, what we think is a really good solution for this, and that is all of our connectivity stuff and the infrastructure. And I’m going to talk a little bit about that at the beginning here. And then also with our new AI Assist module where we have an AI generator that helps you generate these integrations. It turned out that it was a really good way of figuring out how do you map these complex errors, EDI documents that are tweaked by every single business partner. How do you simplify the mapping process and the connection process for connecting your systems, your IBM I applications to the documents that are coming in or the documents that you’re generating? So Aaron is actually going to get more into detail around that and show you some demos of how all of that works. So to start to get into it here. So we’ll talk a little bit about what are some of the challenges around EDI onboarding. So what are the things that people have told us? And this is really stuff that comes directly from our customers where they said, here’s why we’d like you to take a look at this EDI space, because these are the things that we’re struggling with. So we’ll talk a little about that. You maybe recognize some of the challenges that we bring up. And then what are the components? What do you have to think about in creating EDI connections? One of the interesting things about EDI is it’s been around for a very, very long time. And so a lot of the technologies that are fundamental to EDI are very old and don’t take advantage of some of the kinds of things you can do with today’s technology. So we’ll talk about some of the components and some of the things you can use in enhancing your EDI environment. And then just like any other integration, any other connection, if you are trading these documents, you need to ensure that, that they’re very secure. You don’t want people looking at the documents you’re sharing. You don’t want anybody to use that EDI connection as a way to get into your systems. So you want to think about how are we doing this communication. And you know, early on, all EDI communications were being done with just FTP, not even with sftp. So people were sending these EDI files in plain text and with very, very little authentication around them. And so people are starting to tighten up on that. Then we’ll talk a little bit about how do you automate this process of generating the EDI connections and the mappings into your database and the business processes surrounding your EDI documents. So we’ll talk a little bit about that and we’ll talk about the AI assist to actually help make that process easier. Again, like I said, Aaron’s going to show you some demos so you can see actually how the process works. And we’ll have time at the end for some Q and A. But as Maia said, if you have questions, just please feel free to use the Q and A button on the screen and put your questions in there. So just a little bit about why is this important? Like I said, EDI has been around for a very long time. Well, it looks like EDI is going to be around for a long time still. As you can see, EDI adoption is growing. It’s across industry. This is the market value, is the market value of people who provide EDI solutions. So all of those companies are growing and it’s EDI is being used across industries. So in healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, it’s all over the place. The number of transactions, interesting. This 33 billion transactions actually something I picked up just from a particular websites OpenText is a, is they, they actually host EDI transactions and they do 33 billion. But that’s just one platform. You can imagine the actual number of total transactions is much, much, much higher than that. And it’s, it represents a significant amount of business. So we’re talking trillions of dollars of business are flowing through the economy in EDI documents. So this is something that is really critically important. And again, these are just the numbers from OpenText. So you again imagine that the overall market numbers are much, much, much bigger than that fact. I think one of the statistics here is that 60% of all online transactions are being done EDI. And we’re expecting something like $100 trillion worth of online transactions. So you do the math on that. It could be 50, 60 trillion dollars of transactions that are being handled through EDI. So it remains a very, very, very important part of our economy.

Dan Magid

So these are some of the things that our customers have come to us and said, hey, can you help us with these challenges that were happening? This is one of the big challenges and that is onboarding new partners. If I need to get a new partner on board. And that’s kind of the point of our, our session today is how do I get them on right away? We actually have had customers tell us that they walk away from potential business because onboarding the customer to their EDI system is just too hard or that they, or, or that they have to Wait four to six weeks, sometimes two or three months before they can actually get a partner onboarded. And during that time they can’t do business. And so they’re losing revenue. So this has been a real problem. How can we speed up that, that process of onboarding new, new, new business partners? And one of the challenges of that is this inconsistent standard use. And we call the EDI the non standard standard because everybody tweaks their EDI documents so nobody uses them just sort of out of the box. I think the original idea of EDI was, yeah, everybody would use exactly the same formats and it would be really easy to transfer data. And it’s just not how it turned out. Everybody needed to tweak the EDI documents for their particular needs and that makes it harder to do these integrations. And then, as I mentioned earlier, there was very little security early on on these documents. People were just sending out flat files or sending them, you know, open flat files and open text and just dropping a file onto your system, or you drop a file onto their system with very, very little security around who could access them and what they could do with them. And then the whole translation problem of how do I get things from an EDI format, which is a very, very proprietary specific format to the EDI ecosystem, how do I get that into a more useful format that’s more universal? So how do I get that, that data into DB2 kind of a format, or how do I get it into a JSON format so I can share it? Or how do I get it into an XML format, some other kind of a format that’s a more standard, more easily shared kind of a format? And then a lot of the processing of EDI was designed to be batch oriented. Again, you’d get a file of things and you would just process through the file. So you weren’t getting real time kinds of transaction processing things were waiting for a batch process to run in order to get them. So you didn’t have real time visibility into, into the business, into the things that were happening. And then one of the things that I think drove the current demand was the whole idea of this unpredictable licensing environment where licensing was being done based on the number of transactions, the number of documents being processed. And so you never really knew how much were you going to have to spend because you didn’t know, you didn’t know up front how many documents you were going to be processing. And then we’ve also seen some of the big supply chain vendors, some of the people who are in the very Very large supply chains are moving away from EDI and into APIs. And there’s been a difficulty in how do I map that process, how do I change from processing an EDI document to actually using APIs. So what we’re attempting to do with the Adani solution is to, is to cross that barrier to make these things easier. And part of that we can do part of that because, and we did come from doing APIs originally. So we understand the whole API environment, we understand how to do these integrations, how modern integrations are done. And so we’re taking those concepts and applying them to the EDI environment to try to give you the best of both worlds, where you can participate in the whole EDI ecosystem using all the standard EDI documents, but take advantage of the kinds of things you can do today in an API environment for doing integration.

Dan Magid

So some of the things that are specific we run into specifically in the IBM I world is first is securing the environment. Just how do you, how do you secure your IBM I for, for most of us, we know the IBMI is our core processor. It’s where we’re running all of our business applications. And so making sure that nobody can get in and mess around with those machines is really critically important. So how do I make sure that I know who’s coming in, what it is that they’re allowed to do, what it is they’re sending to me, that the stuff they’re sending to me is valid? They want to want to make sure that that’s a secure connection, it’s a secure process, and that they can process the EDI documents that their customers need. So as much as we’d like to say no, everybody just use the same version of the EDI document. We know that’s not the reality, that’s not the real world. So how do you process the customized EDI documents? And then how do you get things from an EDI format and into something the IBM I can actually process? So how do you get it into a DB2 database or into parameter kinds of data? How do you get it into something you can use? And then what we’ve, we’re now seeing, and this is kind of a really current thing, we’re seeing customers who are handling very large volumes of these documents. And so they want to start moving into an event driven environment rather than doing batch processing of files, you know, that are, that are sent via FTP or sftp, they want to say, no, I want to, as soon as, as soon as a PO comes in, I want it processed. I want it to happen real time, immediately. And so we’re seeing some people who are integrating these new event driven messaging systems like Kafka, like Amazon, SNS and sqs into their process so they can process those documents very, very rapidly and yet have that sequencing of the documents. What order did they come in? Making sure everything’s happening in the appropriate order, that they have that audit trail of everything that’s been processed. So the message brokers allow you to do real time processing very, very fast in a very, very secure environment.

Dan Magid

So for those of you who aren’t familiar with Erdani Connect, Erdani Connect is basically a framework for doing integrations. The Erdani Connect provides a lot of capabilities around developing integrations and then for managing them. And we’re going to do the same thing for your EDI environment so we can help generate the EDI integration. So generate the processing of EDI document, generate code to process the EDI documents and then generate code for mapping that data into your data structures and then going the other way of taking data that’s in your data structures and mapping them then into EDI documents. Once we’ve generated those integrations, then we also provide you with an operations desk so you can keep track of exactly what’s happening. We’re going to actually talk about this side of the house a lot more in our next webinar when we talk about monitoring where you can keep track of how many documents are coming in, how many are coming in by customer, how much is the total value of those documents, what revenue does it represent, Whatever kinds of statistics you want to track, you can do that. So we’re going to manage both the development and deployment of these EDI connections as well as the operations for managing them. And you can just see there, there are a lot of different kinds of integrations we’ve done. But again today we’re going to be really focusing here on this bottom box, which is the EDI integration. So the first thing we want to make sure is, is that we are doing this in a secure fashion so that we are encrypting everything. So for example, we encrypt all of the things, all the, all the traffic that goes through Erdani Connect gets encrypted so that we’re making sure it’s enc. Encrypted at rest and it’s encrypted in transit. We’re making sure you know who it is that’s sending you the document, that there’s nothing in the documents that might be A Trojan horse that’s designed to attack your system. And we’re going to examine the data that’s coming in and make sure that it’s safe. And then you can choose whatever authentication method you want to use for communicating either outbound, where you’re talking, you’re sending documents to somebody and they have requirements of what they want you to do or how you want to handle the inbound. You know, do you want to use encrypted tokens? Do you want to have people using IBMI credentials? Do you want to have things like third party authorizations like, like OAuth or you know, Okta, do you want to put those things in place? And when we generate your, your integrations, we generate those, those kinds of security modules right along with it so that when you put those, when you, those, those EDI connections into production, you know that your system is going to be protected.

Dan Magid

So the purple box here really represents, for those of you who aren’t familiar with aerodyne Connect, this is what Erdani Connect does it, it’s doing, as I talked about all the security, it’s doing the data transformations from the EDI documents. Now our, our approach and Aaron will talk more about this, but our approach is to say let’s take the EDI document, we’ll turn it into JSON because JSON is a standard format that we can then do anything with. And we have customers who want us to take the data and put it into the IBMI database. We have customers who actually do EDI to EDI transactions where they take EDI data from one format and put it into another format or they add data into an acknowledgment kind of a message so they want to be able to take that data and use it. So we put it into that JSON format so that we have tremendous flexibility in what we can then do with the data. If it’s going to the IBMI database, we automatically do then the transformation into the IBMI data structures and put it into the database for you. As I said, we also look at the data to make sure that nobody’s sending in data that might be dangerous to your system. We’re making sure that we’re protecting you from any kinds of attacks that might be trying to come in through those connections. We also generate all the logging and auditing code so you get lots and lots of visibility into exactly what’s happening throughout this process. Typically this integration process is going to have many layers and we’re going to make sure that you have visibility throughout the layers to see everything that’s happening. And then as I talk about in our next webinar, we’re going to talk a lot about how do you monitor this stuff so you can keep track of the traffic that’s coming in, make sure that you’re not getting spikes in traffic that are unexpected. If you are you getting slow response time, those kinds of things. So you can monitor everything that’s happening with this. And then if you need to respond to that by throttling the traffic or by blocking people or whatever, you can set up tools that will actually do that for you. And then all the error handling is in there. So that if something fails, for whatever reason will give you information for what to do next. And all of this can be integrated into a change management environment. So if you want to do something like git for managing the development that you’re doing for your APIs, for your EDI connections, you can do that.

Dan Magid

So this is a kind of a map of how things work in an Erdani environment for processing these EDI documents. So, you know, so you’ve got your trading partners and this is, you’ll see that the arrows are two ways. So it can go left to right or it can go right to left. So it can do left to right that you’ve got inbound documents coming into you. Right to left says I’ve got outbound documents that I’m creating that I am then sending out. So, so the documents come in from your trading partners. And we have an embedded FTP, SFTP and AS2 server. So we can, we can handle the, the documents that are coming in. We take the, the inbound documents, it goes to our, our EDI translator. The EDI translator is what extracts the data from the, the different formats from the different EDI documents and turns them into that JSON data. So we then end up with a JSON version of the data which includes the schema description. So we understand now we have a smart document basically that tells us exactly what is that data. And it’s now in a standard format that can be processed in a variety of ways. We then validate the data. So we’re going to look at the data and make sure the data is valid because we want to, if there are problems in the data, we want to catch them before they start crashing your IBM I programs. We want to get them right up front. So we’re going to validate the data, make sure that it’s right. We’re then going to do that mapping into the target environment. So if it has to go to a DB2 database, we’re going to do the mapping into the DB2 database and that’s being built or being generated using our AI based natural language EDI data mapper. And Aaron is actually going to show you how that works so that, that you can build these integrations very, very quickly. And then with that you can take that data and execute programs, put it into the database, create new documents, different types of documents. And as I said, everything is being monitored so all the stuff is being monitored so you can track what’s happening. And again, so that’s kind of the left to right, something’s coming in. Same thing. If you’re going right to left, we will generate the code to actually create EDI documents from your data and it goes through basically the same process, only backwards and creates the EDI documents for you.

Dan Magid

This is just a diagram of if you want to go to those event driven systems again with Aerodyne Connect, you can do that. So if you want to take advantage of, rather than sending batch files of documents, you want to say no, I want these to be events that if somebody sends a po, it gets pulled, processed immediately. I have them each as individual events that I can deal with and I can have multiple subscribers to those events so I can have multiple applications that are looking at that data. So maybe my warehouse management system needs to see the data as well as my order entry system needs to see the data and my data warehouse needs to see the data so I can have them all subscribing to these event brokers and they will then be able to get that information. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to do the translation and put that stuff out as JSON messages so they can process them however they want. If they want us to process them. Then again, Erdani Connect can pull the messages off the message brokers and map them into your, into your database. But this just gives you a way of doing very, very real time, very resilient kind of processing of these EDI document. And this is just an example of, you know, here I’ve got, I’ve got my EDI document, I’ve got a 204 here. And what we do with that is we take that and we turn this, we turn that into this, this kind of a JSON document

Dan Magid

and then we, you can manage that. So here you can. I’m just showing, All I’m showing here is that I can have this all in git and so I can manage everything inside of Git and I can keep track of the changes in Git and go back and look at the history of changes and use our workbench to deploy the EDI connections as you create them. This is just a quick preview of the monitoring. Again, not going to go into a lot of detail around this, but you can create these very, very nice graphical dashboards around all of your EDI processing. Okay, so that’s kind of an overview of what it is that we do now. What I’m going to do is I’m going to turn things over to Aaron and let Aaron actually talk about specifically how you do this with aerodyne.

Aaron Magid

All right, well, thank you, Dan, for that great introduction. I’m really excited about this. I love working with the EDI stuff because it’s giving us a really, I guess, from a technology perspective, I think it’s very exciting because what we’re doing is applying the intelligence that we’ve been building into our systems for simpler integrations. But EDI integrations are really complicated oftentimes. And so it’s always an interesting thing. I get to. One of my great privileges is getting to work with the AI team here about, and work out those sort of, what we call them, the thought processes of the system on how it’ll figure these kinds of things out. Anyway, so edi. EDI is a fun one. I like it. So I’m going to share my screen and I’m going to show you what this system looks like, you know, what it actually looks like to use this. And before I do that, I just want to set the stage here for what I’m going to do. So what I’m going to do here is first I’m going to go through just a quick setup because I want you to see what, what our tools look like, what, what do we do with this and what does it look like to actually, you know, interact with an EDI integration here? And, and then what we’re going to do is we’re gonna, we’re gonna back up a little bit and go back through it. I think from the perspective of a, of a real process, meaning what does it actually look like to onboard a customer? And I’ll add in some. Or a trading partner and I’ll, I’ll add in some, some commentary throughout it to, to help out with, you know, just to kind of add in what we see when we actually do these integrations. Now, the reason I want to start off with the tools is that there’s really two modes of operating that, that, that our customers operate with these tools. Right? One is that they use these tools, the same tools that I’m going to show here, they use these tools to generate EDI integrations. Great, love it. You know, they, they go off and they build, you know, lots of wonderful integrations. The other way is that they ask us to do it. And, and one point that I want to make up front is that for the groups that ask us to do it, the, the, we’re using, we’re using these tools, right? So these tools are going to be the same. This is how we’re going to be building things. Regardless of how, of, of how the tools are being used. It all comes down really to the tools that are available in here. So that’s why I’m going to focus on that. So what I’m going to do here, first of all, I’m going to pull up a document here. For some of you, this may look familiar, for others not. This is a 204 that I’ve got this, this particular EDI document. And what I’m looking at here, there’s a couple of things that I want to do. First of all, I need to be able to process this document. So I have actually already set up an integration for this document. So once I’ve set up an integration for the document, what I can do is take my documents, I can send them into the system and after it processes them, I will be able to see this in my IBMi database is actually where I’m going to do this. I’ve got, I’ve got this going into, actually directly into my IBM I database. So what I’ve got here is if we look at this, this is the sample document. You know, I’ve got, For example, this 1111 Main street this was in my EDI document. So if I send this in and I have it process my document, I can jump back to my database and I can look over at my database records. And if you look, this is a little small, but if you look down at the bottom of my screen here, let’s see, I can zoom in there. You can see I’ve got that 11 Main street in my IBMI database now, right. Those fields that I pulled from that document, that stuff is all in my system and I can work with it with the same tools that I use the rest of my day, whatever I like using on my IBM, I, I’ve got access to that, to that data. And a critical piece here that I, that I want to highlight is, is that when I processed this EDI document, when I actually, you know, run these calls, this is sending out the document and getting a successful processing response back in a little under a quarter of a second, right? And, and this is where we talk about, you know, we, we need to make sure that our EDI systems are able to process our transactions very, very quickly, right. And that they’re able to scale and that they’re able to handle the volumes that we’re getting at, right. So this type of integration, once I’ve built it, is able to process this document, it’s able to take this data and get that into wherever I need it to go. In this case, I told it I wanted in my IBMi database, but it’s going to go to wherever my systems need it. So a generic mapping system. So one of the things that I want to do here is I want to show you how I actually got there, right? That’s a completed integration. Okay, cool. How do I actually get there? Because one of the things that we’ve seen as we’ve been doing EDI integrations, you know, is that really, that’s that, that, that’s the hard part, right? You know, when we first started doing EDI integrations, like, you know, the very first ones that we did, I remember.

Dan Magid

When.

Aaron Magid

We, we were focused on, okay, how do you map the documents, how do you take an existing integration and move it over? How do you, what we learned when we actually talked to, you know, as we talked to real, you know, to EDI shops, as we, we started to really get into it, I remember having these conversations where what we, what we found is that, well, really, it’s the new partner onboarding that’s difficult. Really. It’s the building of integrations, the setting up of these integrations, of these mappings that really, in my conversations with a lot of shops, really tends to drive the EDI developers nuts. So that’s really what we’re focused on here. So I want to take you through what that looks like right now that we’ve seen a completed integration. Let’s go through what that looks like and hopefully that will color also how these tools help streamline the processes and, and make it a lot less painful. So I’m going to give you guys an example here. Let’s say that I’ve received a request to do an integration with a new trading partner. I’ve got my trading partner id, E, F, G, H, who I’m talking to. They want to send me a 204, right? So that’s who that, that’s that’s what I need to do. I need to be talking with this group and I need to set up my process to be able to handle their document. Now, I process 204s all the time, right? Let’s say I’m a logistics company. I have no, you know, I got lots of those integrations, but I’ve never done this trading partner before. And this is where, where we get into what, what Dan had mentioned earlier, you know, where we’ve heard from a lot of groups actually that, that they will be unable to do business with certain customers who they want to do business with because it’s not worth it to put in the amount of effort that it takes to get the EDI integration up and running. So that’s really what we’ve been targeting here. So let’s say I got this request. What I’m going to do is I’m going to go to my new trading partner and I’m going to ask them for a test document or a series of test documents and their implementation guide. Normal stuff, right? Not anything out of the ordinary. For what I need, then what I’m going to do is I’m going to go to my system and I’m going to describe what do I want to happen with this document when I receive it, where do I want this data to go? In my system, the most common integration that we see is I want to take an EDI document and I want to put the data into my IBMi database and then I’m going to have an RPG program and process it. Fine. We also see some integrations where I say I want to take this document and I need to publish a Kafka message with a result, or I need to take this document and I need to send an API call, or I need to do all of the above, right? I’m going to take the document, put something in this database, something in that database, make an API call, send a text message, send an email and then generate some documentation, send a PDF, order out, right? Whatever it is, we get, we get a lot of different things here. So what I’m going to do here is I’ve got my sample document and I’ve. And I, I’ve set up a sample of what I want to happen with it. And the way that I’ve done this is by saying to the system, by writing up for the system, okay, I’m going to get this document. It’s got some fields in it. In my database, I’ve got a table called DMO 204 and I’ve got another table called DMO 204D. These are my two tables that I’m going to pull data out from for this. And what I want to do is I want to set up a mapping where given this document. I need this data to go into this column. I need this one, one Main street to go over here. Right. So what I did is I actually told the system, here’s where I need the data to go. This is what I want the end state of my process to right now that I’ve got that, I’m going to go in and I’m going to generate the integration. So what I’m going to say to my system is I’m going to say, okay, I need an EDI integration. I’m going to do EFGH2 actually, because I already have this one 204 and I’m going to say go ahead and generate my integration for me. It’s going to go out, it’s going to go to my application, it’s going to go make some changes to my, to my system to add that integration and then it’s going to come back to me and it’s going to say, okay, you told me you want to do a 204 with this trading partner. Now I know that the chances of this trading partner sending a fully standard document such that I don’t need any additional information are basically zero. Right. I’m going to need something, I need to know what, you know something about this document. So what it comes back in it to me with is it says, okay, I need a sample of this document. I need to see what this group is going to send you. Because chances are there’s something in there that’s not standard. Right? They’ve got codes that aren’t standard. Sometimes I’ve seen full segment sets that are just completely, you know, not allowed by the, by the, the X12 spec. Right. You know we see all kinds of, of crazy stuff in there. So I’m going to take this sample document again. I haven’t really done a lot with this. I haven’t really looked through this, but okay, I’m going to take this test document I got from my trading partner, paste it in there and then I’m going to say, okay, I want this to go into my database. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to take this sample that I put together that I said, okay, this is where I want the data to go and I’m going to say, okay, this goes into the table dmo204 and I want this resulting data from the integration to go over in here into DMO 204D, right? And what this is going to do is it’s going to give the context to my system to say, okay, given this document, this is what should happen with it. So what I’m doing here is, I want to be very clear here. What I’m doing is I’m describing, in an example, the starting state and the ending state. I’m saying I’m going to get this document and I want this data in my database, right? I’ve given it that sample. What the system is going to do is it’s going to go through, like I mentioned before, it’s going to go through that thought process that, that we’ve set up in there, where what it’s going to do is it’s going to start off by saying, okay, let me look at this document. What’s in this document? Is there anything non standard, Is there anything that I need to be looking at specifically to make sure I handle right? Once determines whether or not, you know, once it finds all the points that it needs to identify or that it needs any clarifications on, it’s then going to go over to your data sample. It’s going to say, okay, now I see this data sample, how do I get there? How do I get to this for you? You asked me to take this EDI document and put it into your database in this format. You wanted this start and this end, right? You didn’t tell me how to get there. And that’s part of the point here. We don’t want you to have to worry about how to get there. You just say, here’s where I’m starting, here’s where I’m going. And what it’s going to do is it’s going to generate the mappings for me. And that’s what the process just did. So it came back. I wasn’t timing that, but usually it’s about 45 seconds to a minute to generate one of those processes. And what it has now, for me, for anyone who’s familiar with Erdani Connect, you’ll know that the way that it generates things is by generating industry standard code for an integration. I do not need to look at that code if I don’t want to, but I can if I, if I would like to, right? So at this point, I have an EDI integration. This integration has been built, I can now build, I can now compile this and I can start processing this EDI document, right? So I want to. I want to just pause there for a second, make sure that that’s made sense so far. Because again, what I did here is I took the sample document from my trading partner and I took what I want to happen with it. And that can be a format of a Kafka message, that can be an API call spec that I need to make with it, that can be a database structure. Whatever I need can be all the above. I gave it what I want it to do with the document at a high level, and it then set up the entire integration for me, right? At this point, what I can do is I can start running test calls, right? Like you saw earlier, I can take that 204 and I can process it. The target of this system and what we do with our customers is to streamline the onboarding process for trading partners by streamlining the implementation process. What I mean by that is I’ve watched I don’t know how many EDI integrations at this point, and what I’ve seen, vast majority of the time, is that the killer of EDI integrations is getting off of the phone, right? What I mean by that is I talk to my trading partner and I say, can you send me a sample? And they say, yeah, sure, let’s get off the phone and I’ll send you that sample. And then, you know, two weeks later, I check in and I say, hey, where’s the sample? And they say, oh, sorry, the EDI person went on vacation. They’ll be back next week. Okay, fine. So next week we get the sample. I get back on the phone with them. I have a question, right? I say, okay, I tried to generate from this, but there’s a typo in the document. What should I do? And they say, let me look at it. Okay, we get off the phone, two weeks later, I check in with them. Oh, sorry, somebody else is on vacation. Somebody’s out sick, right? What I see in these integrations is that these kinds of delays end up taking months and months and months to actually get these integrations live. So here’s the powerful thing. I can generate an integration using these tools in about 45 seconds. What that means, practically speaking, this is what I wanted. I wanted to take you guys through how we do an implementation. What that means, practically speaking, is that I can get on the phone with the con, with the EDI people, add a trading partner, and in one call, I can take their document, generate an integration, run a test call, ask them how that went, and if the Data was right. And if they say no, I can come back and say, okay, tell me what was wrong. And I can say in here, no, no, no, this field actually needs to go there, or this field is a composite, or we missed a condition, whatever it is, and I can say regenerate, and 45 seconds later I can run another test call. Right? The point here is that I can do this without getting off of the phone, right? As long as all that, as you know, when we have that documentation, when we are able to get in the.

Dan Magid

Room.

Aaron Magid

These EDI integrations can be generated so quickly that we can iterate in real time. So that’s one of the key, one of the most critical points of this process and what that allows us to do again, is get a working integration out the door very, very quickly, right? So that we can take this integration and we can throw it live. And from there, given the whole platform that we have that’s able to process the documents immediately, we can then get those EDI integrations up and running with a lot less invested in them, with a lot less time, a lot less energy, which of course, when we’re talking about hours of our, of our team members, you know, translates to a lot less money that we spend on the, on the integration process, right? Which means that we can actually afford to, and we, meaning our customers, can afford to take that deal with the small supplier or the small customer that wants to do, you know, $10,000 in business or $50,000 in business that previously we had said, sorry, it’s going to cost us more than that to set up the edi. So I can’t do it right now. We can actually say, yeah, it’s going to cost us, you know, a couple hours. We’ll get on the phone with you, we’ll get it set up, done, right? Not a problem, right? So now suddenly it’s worth it to start gathering in all those other customers that we’ve been saying that we’ve had, that our customers have had to say no to for all this time. And that’s what we’re seeing, is that as we do these integrations, we’re able to set up these integrations for groups that were previously unable to integrate. And that’s really the target here, you know, for everything that we do is to allow IBM I Shops to connect to other companies and to other systems that previously were either impossible or infeasible. Right? Everything Erdani does is really, really built around, around that ideology. The last comment that I want to make here and then I’ll kick it back to to Dan is, is that a question came up earlier about hybrid integrations that was asked in the, in the Q and A. And I just wanted to take a second to, to look at that. That, for example, and I’m reading this, this example out of the Q and A. For example, let’s say we receive in 850, I need to validate and transform it, then write it to a DB2 or SQL database and then trigger REST API call to a logistics provider. Totally valid case. I’m actually working on a real integration right now with one of our customers where one of the things we have to do is take a 214 and translate it into an API call that’s totally normal. So the way that we do this kind of thing, first of all, in these instructions, I can give it whatever I need, right? The Erdani Connect platform can connect to anything. It’ll connect to your IBM I, it’ll call RPG programs, it’ll make API calls, it’ll transfer documents over FTP or sftp, it will send Kafka messages, it will read from service buses or you know, Amazon call. Whatever you need, it’s in there, right? But I want to give you guys an example of it. So let’s say, you know, let me give this, let’s, let’s use this example. So I have this integration where I said, okay, I want to set this up so that after I do this database integration, I want it to, to make an API call. So let’s say, okay, after processing my 204 document, what am I gonna say? I’m gonna say use this tool to call an API. Let’s say to call the, I don’t know, the, the numbers API using, using the number 204. As in, right, whatever. I’m going to give it a, you know, relatively simple case here just so you don’t waste your time. Fill, you know, writing whole prompt here, right? What I’m going to do here is I’m going to say, okay, do this for me. After you process my document, I want you to call this API and I want you to, to make this call function, right? When I do that, what’s going to happen is it’s going to go over and it’s going to go update my integration to do that. And I’m jumping into the code just for a second to see it. But I just want to point out that it updated this and it did actually throw in a URL here for what it’s going to do. With this integration. Right. Again, I don’t have to look at this code. I can if I want to, but the assistant is able to do basically everything I need. Right. And so at that point, again, that can get, I can iterate on this. I can keep going and make this as complicated as I want. Right. Whatever that process is, you know, even if it’s going through, you know, a thousand steps in here, we can, we can get there, right? That’s. It’s just a matter of knowing what we need and we can, we can get that set up very quickly. So anyway, I’m gonna kick this back over to. To Dan and Migs. I know we’re basically at time here and thank you all for, for watching and listening.

Maia Samboy

Yeah, thank you for joining us everybody. We are just at time here but we do have our second session planned for Thursday, August 28th and that will be EDI operations and monitoring, real time alerting and control at your fingertips. So definitely join us then to learn more. If you do have any follow up questions, feel free to reach out to me via email. I’m happy to pass those along to Dan and Aaron and keep an eye out for the recording. We hope to see you next time.

Dan Magid

Great. Thanks everybody.

Maia Samboy

Thank you so much for joining us.

Aaron Magid

Thank you all.