GENTRAN EDI CONSULTING
As part of a Gentran EDI Consulting platform, regardless of IBM announcing their sunset of the Gentran product, companies can remain calm. Gentran EDI Consulting resources from Data Integration Specialists can buy some time for your company and allow the health of your EDI production data to flow. Beccause IBM has announced that Gentran support has lapsed and they will no longer field support calls or maintain the product, many companies are faced with a decision; either hang on to the product and risk the prospect of requiring support, or look at options for migrating to the IBM Sterling Integrator flagship solution.
Because the other factor is that companies do not have this in their budget, it becomes a financial decision and not just a technology determination. To that end, Data Integration Specialists and their IBM Gentran EDI Consulting group has made the bold decision to offer both the Support of the Gentran product in addition to providing a path to migrate all production EDI data to the new platform. This provides the customer with some time so that they can remain on the Gentran solution while reviewing options for the future. As well, it then affords them the opportunity to accurately budget for the migration and implementation of the new platform.
GENTRAN MIGRATION PATH TO STERLING INTEGRATOR
Because IBM has announced a sunset of their Gentran Support for their EDI product, it begs the question as to what path options are available for a Gentran upgrade? The answer is: there many options as you look to Gentran upgrade paths which include some top tier and powerful EDI platforms. Enterprises, manufacturers and other growing organizations work with a wide variety of business partners around the world to meet the needs of their customers and there have been thousands of upgrades already. Once the process of the Gentran upgrade is finished, B2B processes and the high volume of B2B transactions will be optimized for efficiency and scale.
Many EDI solutions by provide secure, reliable integration of all B2B processes and integrations through a single gateway. As a result, organizations become better organized, more efficient, and their scalable B2B relationships are improved.
These enterprise EDI solutions connect your ECommerce to your other B2B integrations – simplifying supply chain operations, securing communication networks, automating Ecommerce tasks and improving scalability. The Gentran upgrade processes place organizations into a best of breed application that ensures Ecommerce processes run efficient and your EDI trading partner relationships are healthy and growing.
Enterprise level EDI software applications:
Sterling Integrator, OpenText BizManager, TIE Kinetix SmartBridge, ECS Delta / Liasion, WebMethods and more.
Some Enterprise level EDI features:
- Business Process Management – All enterprise products approach to integration centers around business process management. A business process is a goal-driven, ordered flow of activities that accomplishes a business objective.
- Core Transaction Engine – The Engine orchestrates all processes including your message exchange, routing, translation, and other important business processes.
- Business Process Visibility – During the execution of a business process, at every step, these platforms maintainsthe status of the process and the current version of the business data associated with the process step.
- Process Automation – Do your employees have to re-enter data from one system or process into another? All EDI platforms will help you streamline and automate routine tasks, thereby eliminating redundant manual data entry and the inevitable costly errors it introduces to your business processes. The platform architecture is intended to run identified processes in a scheduled, automated fashion. Workflows can be set up to run in unattended mode and in the background which lessens manual tasks, decreases errors and reduces time that your EDI Admin has to monitor production data flow.
- Intelligent On boarding– Uses partner self-provisioning to simplify trading partner on boarding process. With built-in templates to standardize the on boarding process, and the ability to create customized and reusable business processes, the platforms can help you connect with partners and automate business processes with them more quickly, regardless of partner size, importance or type. These solutions will also significantly reduce the burden on your staff by automating much of the on boarding process.
- Web Extensions – you can create and customize pages that users can access over the Internet to interact with data. The browser-based technology works hand-in-hand with other components.
- Flexible support for B2B data formats and protocols– All platforms support multi-gigabyte file handling, policy-based file transfer, web services (SOAP), HTTP, HTTPS, S/FTP/S client and server, AS1, AS2, AS3, SMTP, RosettaNet, Zengin TCP/IP, WebDAV, and IBM Sterling Connect:Direct.
- Any-to-any data mapping/translation– Includes a multi-purpose data transformation engine and graphical data mapping tool to support all common EDI standards, XML standards, and Internet standards for B2B data transactions.
- Document automation processing– Creates end-to-end process automation through document conversion, routing, delivery, exception handling, and business rule validation.
- Over 300 adapters– Most applications include adapters for enterprise solutions like SAP, Oracle, JDEdwards and more.