Electronic Transaction Management

Solution description

To enable a synchronous electronic document flow between you and all your trading partners we integrate Dynamics AX (Axapta’s) Commerce Gateway with BizTalk Server to act as a fully automated tool for document exchange in virtually any electronic document format that your business partners may have implemented in their ERP systems.A good example of those formats is the UN standard EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). Setting up a vast EDI standard is a costly undertaking, introduced usually into multibillion revenue companies. We give you the opportunity to be able to process, send and receive sales orders, invoices as well as other documents immediately to your trading partners with minimal effort and expense.

The use of Commerce Gateway saves your time as the data is entered directly to communicating ERP systems of both partners. There will be no need to implement a distinguished EDI system and transfer business process data from xcbl manually.

Our goals:

- Integration of Commerce Gateway and BizTalk for automated electronic document exchange

- Making BizTalk Server become Axapta’s automated tool for electronic document exchange

- Automatic processing, mapping and exchange of any document formats (eg. EDIFACT) not supported by default in xcblbased Axapta

Client Benefits

- Convert, process and send electronic documents of any format your trade partner might have in an instant

- Downplay complex and time consuming business processes to a single click

- Eliminate human errors during document translation

- Electronically sign and authenticate the documents

- Recognize your partners faultlessly by their unique GLN (Global Location Number)

- Save significant cost on the implementation and remain able to communicate freely with customers using EDIFACT

- Lessen your own administration, replace paper documents with cheaper, reliable and secure electronic document flow

- Exercise BizTalk Server as a tool for internal and external business processes' orchestration

Our client – a food producer is a supplier of a cash&carry hypermarket chain. When the supplies in the hypermarket are under a certain level, their ERP system generates a replenishment order, even if just for a handful of items.

Before the implementation, our client was being flooded by the hypermarket tens of supply orders each day to different destinations. The requested amounts were shipped from to remote cold stores and then passed to hypermarket warehouses. If the shipment went without problems the confirmation arrived after 30 days and only then the food producer could send an invoice and wait for payment. The whole process took months, was spread over thousands of few-item orders and was exposed to a significant risk from human errors.

The Solution:

The process in 6 steps:

1. Customer’s ERP system sends Sales Order for supplies

2. Sales Order is processed by BizTalk and registered in Axapta

3. BizTalk sends Shipment Order to the Cold Store

4. The shipment is sent and received

5. Customer’s ERP system sends Shipment Receipt

6. BizTalk sends the Invoice

We succeeded in creating an automated xcbl to EDIFACT conversion, so now the document flow was a matter of two-side ERP system communication.

The remote cold store also used EDI format and the food producer can now instantly check whether the supplies are enough to cover the hypermarket needs.

Axapta automatically generates supply orders, creating no waste overproduction. The arrival receipt is received and registered in Axapta and on that basis an invoice is generated and resent to the hypermarket chain.

The whole document exchange takes from a few seconds to few hours (depending on both parties’ batch data input systems and platforms). In most EU countries the law states that EDIFACT document exchange justifies a complete business transaction. Now our client doesn’t even need to print or sign any paper documents.

GLN Marking:

We eliminated the possibility of confusing the purchasers by introducing a UN-standard – GLN (Global Location Number). This 13-digit number uniquely identifies any trading partner location, even if for a large number of warehouses scattered across various countries. This fact makes it impossible to confuse the destinations on sale and purchase orders.

Additions:

The communication and xcbl to EDIFACT mapping is processed by BizTalk Server and completely transparent for Axapta. We can implement additional functionality, such as digital signature of the orders and invoices or authentication of the senders.

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