EDI transformation brings supply chains alive

High volume business-to-business EDI messaging, transformation and management IT, used routinely in finance and insurance, are coming to industry. Xenos, which carved a niche for itself in structured data transformation, messaging and routing, is now focusing on what it terms the ‘information supply chain’ applicable to all businesses. Lee Garrison, VP of marketing, believes that manufacturers, typically with legacy applications and data, now understand the need to move more to automated business processes and Internet trading. “So we’re offering the technologies to print stream or do web-based business processing in whatever format they need with their trading partners,” he says. “For example, we can take standard EDI, Swift X12, whatever, and convert that automatically to another data structure.” It’s about getting away from people manually handling transactions, an instead having systems root out exceptions and errors that need that level of attention. “The issue is there are potentially very high volumes of EDI, and when there are exceptions or errors that can cause order processing to stop, eventually causing plant downtime. So our systems catch the exceptions and route them to someone who can solve them.” One of Xenos success stories is the Port Infolink supply chain automation project at the Port of Rotterdam. That now has some 1,800 business partners in an ‘electronic community’ handling EDI for cargo manifests and the rest and transforming a huge range of data formats no the fly to standard XML for back office automation.