Electronic Document Interchange, or EDI, is often understood as something fairly complex and difficult in realization in ERP system. Let’s consider scenarios and how they could be realized without third party EDI add-on, just in regular Great Plains, assuming that you have some familiarity with SQL Server and SQL select statement and GP Integration Manager.
We will consider both situations – when you are customer and you are replenishing your inventory via EDI compliant vendors channel as well as when you are the vendor to whom Purchase Order is placed through EDI channel:
1. Inventory restocking via EDI channel. Here we assume that you are large organization, and you have Dynamics GP as your headquarters ERP system. In GP Purchase Order Processing module, please issue Purchase Order and save it. Then open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio 2005 and new query. Build your new formatted Select statement to extract and form the data from the following tables: POP10100 (Purchase Order Header Work) and POP10110 (Purchase Order Line Work). Formatted Select statement means, that each field you select with either CAST or CONVERT operators. EDI file typically is saved as fixed length text file with header, lines and trailer, you save your formatted select statement as text file. We recommend you to setup SQL DTS package, which will select new purchase orders, mark them as exported to EDI, save new EDI text file and distribute this file to EDI recipients
2. Receiving EDI orders from your customer. Here is reverse situation, when you are the vendor in EDI channel for large organization. For you EDI request should translate into Dynamics GP Sales Order or Invoice. This scenario is slightly more complex and we will describe you successful scenario. You deploy either Great Plains Integration Manager or eConnect custom application (which does the same job but in real time, if this is your goal). In IM you create new Source as Advanced ODBC and you base this source on MS SQL Server custom View. This custom view reads new EDI file, parses it to SOP Document Header and Document Lines, then in IM destination you map it to SOP document – customer Order, Invoice or Quote is this is your scenario. eConnect programming, if you are using Dynamics GP version 10.0, you are probably aware that IM is in process of being rewritten in eConnect. So, this means that you future IM integration should be pretty similar to custom eConnect programming. At this time, of course, eConnect gives you complete control over Integration timing and allows you to trigger integration on demand or on event triggering
3. EDI Add-Ons. Before you jump there, please try to analyze free approach, we tried it several times and it works successfully for multiple GP customers. If you think you got special case, in our opinion its uniqueness often falls into the need to translate Vendor Item Names from your Catalogue Items, or similar small translations and tweaks, in our opinion, it is not the reason to pay high price for high end EDI add-on
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