A customer has asked you to do EDI. Here is what they mean.
They want to stop emailing you orders. Instead their system should hand the order to your system directly, in a shape both machines agree on, so nobody has to read it and type it in. That is the whole idea. Everything else is detail about which shape and which route.
This page has no jargon in it. If you want the words your customer keeps using, they are at the bottom, one line each.
How the order reaches you today.
Most likely it arrives as a mail with an attachment, and then a person becomes the integration.
Somebody has to be at their desk
An order that lands on a Friday evening waits until Monday. Your customer cannot see that it is waiting, so they call to ask.
Typing invents mistakes
A wrong quantity or a wrong item number is not caught by anyone until the goods are on a lorry. The correction costs more than the order.
Nobody can answer "did it arrive"
A mail in an inbox is not a receipt. There is no record that says the order was accepted, and no record that says it was refused either.
So what is EDI, actually.
Two companies agree on two things. First, the exact shape of a document: an order has a number here, a delivery date there, a line per item, each with a code both sides recognise. Second, how it travels: a secure route between the two systems instead of a mail server. Agree on those two, and a computer can read the order without a human in between.
The acronyms your customer mentions are just names for those agreements. EDIFACT is one of the agreed shapes. AS2 and Peppol are agreed routes. Nothing more mysterious than that.
The order arrives already filled in
It becomes a sales order in Dynamics 365, with the customer, the dates and the lines in place. Your team confirms it rather than retypes it.
Your answers go back the same way
The confirmation, the despatch note and the invoice all travel back automatically as you post them. Your customer stops phoning to ask.
Every exchange leaves a receipt
Both sides get a machine acknowledgement, so "did it arrive" has an answer that is written down rather than remembered.
You keep working where you already work
The status sits on the order itself, inside Dynamics 365. There is no separate website to log into, which is the part most people expect and do not get. See a message become a record.
What you actually have to decide.
Less than people fear, and most of it comes from your customer rather than from you.
Which documents, to start with
Almost always the order coming in and the invoice going out. The confirmation and the despatch note usually follow. You do not have to do all of them at once.
Which route your customer uses
They will tell you, and it is usually one line in their onboarding pack. If they name something we do not carry yet, we will say so plainly rather than promise it.
Who your first partner is
Start with the customer that asked. One partner working end to end teaches you more than five half connected, and the second one takes a fraction of the time.
Your own item numbers
Your customer will send their codes for the goods. Those have to line up with yours once, at setup. This is the part worth doing carefully, and it is a spreadsheet, not a project.
What you will not have to decide: servers, certificates, message formats, or which version of a standard your partner is on. That is the part we carry.
The words you will hear.
One line each, so you can read your customer's onboarding pack without a dictionary.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| EDI | Exchanging business documents between two systems in an agreed shape, instead of by mail and typing. |
| EDIFACT | The most common agreed shape in Europe. A plain text file with a strict grammar. Your customer may name a version such as D96A. |
| ORDERS | The EDIFACT name for a purchase order. The document your customer sends you. |
| ORDRSP | Your answer to an order: what you confirm, in what quantity, for which date. |
| DESADV | The despatch advice. What is on the way, down to pallet and batch, sent when you ship. |
| INVOIC | The invoice, sent the same way as everything else rather than as a PDF by mail. |
| GLN | A thirteen digit number that identifies a company or a delivery address. Think of it as a postcode for machines. |
| AS2 · AS4 | Two secure routes between two systems. Signed and encrypted, with a receipt coming back. |
| Peppol | A shared network, used widely in the Nordics and for public sector buyers. You join it once rather than connecting to each partner. |
| Acknowledgement | A machine receipt. One kind says the envelope arrived intact, another says the document itself was accepted or refused, and why. |
If a word in your customer's pack is not on this list, send it to us and we will tell you plainly whether it changes anything for you.