EDI IN PURCHASING WITH S/4HANA
If you talk about digitalized business processes, this also implicates digital communication between business partners!
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is mostly used for processes that used to be mapped on paper, for example for purchase orders, invoices and delivery bills. Companies use B2B technology to exchange even large volumes of data and a high volume of documents in a standard format electronically and fully automatically.
The challenge is to adapt paper-based business processes to enable automated processing of business documents. The time required and costs for implementing, configuration and training EDI must also be taken into account accordingly.
Your benefits through EDI
- Fast and bidirectional data exchange
- Automatic processing of large quantities of documents
- System-independent exchange of business partners
- Supply chain stabilization
- Reduction of process times and costs
- Reduction of manual work and therefore lower error rate
- Increased data quality
- Standardized communication
THIS IS HOW EDI WORKS
Due to a manufacturer-independent file format, EDI enables documents to be exchanged between ERP systems of nationally and internationally operating companies. Depending on the type of system, data containers are converted accordingly in order to be processed in the target system. Common message standards are EDIFACT, ODETTE, VDA or XML-EDI. Basically, the use of EDI is system-independent and suitable for all industries. An interface must be set up between the sending and receiving systems. At least one middleware is interposed between the communicating systems, which converts the files into a readable format.
In classic SAP systems and in SAP S/4HANA, ready-made structures are already available for working with EDI. SAP uses IDocs, short for Intermediate Document, as data containers. There are corresponding IDoc types for various business processes, for example for the exchange of purchase orders, invoices, delivery schedules, forecast data and sales orders. The transfer from the SAP to the non-SAP system takes place via a subsystem. With the help of a converter, the SAP IDocs can be easily converted into another readable file format and vice versa.
EDI makes it possible to reduce paper management in companies enormously and to automate and accelerate processes. As a result, process runtimes are shortened and throughputs are increased. Due to international standards and the variety of possible applications, a wide range of industries can benefit from the use of EDI.
