The EDI connection of customers for electronic forwarding orders (Borderos) to support the e-commerce and logistics departments of a paper wholesale company is realised. The EDI connection of customers for Borderos serves as an important step towards digitalisation in form of automation and consolidation of logistics processes.
Supplement
Fortras is an EDI standard for data exchange between freight forwarders. The EDI messages (Borderos) are supported at the customer in the format BORD512. The borderos are transferred from the sender (freight forwarder) to the FTP server of the recipient (paper merchant/freight company). In the middleware 'Lobster_data', the source format (BORD512) is converted into the IDoc target format (ORDERS05), which is uniform for all customers (including goods orderers), by setting up a customer-specific mapping (profile). Another mapping (profile) ensures the uniform transfer for all customers by means of a web service to another middleware (web application developed individually by the customer), with the help of which the data import into the SAP S/4HANA merchandise management system takes place under automatic forwarding order generation. In addition to interface coordination with the e-commerce department, the technical implementation in 'Lobster_data' is a main point of activities.
Subject description
The work is carried out for the customer's IT department on behalf of the e-commerce and logistics departments. The e-commerce department provides technical and organisational support for the EDI connections for its own logistics and its forwarding partners. The use of the tool 'Lobster_data' leads to a strong process standardisation and transfer of the received data to the middleware developed by the customer in structured form (IDoc). Within the web application, the IDocs are either automatically forwarded immediately after successful processing or stopped in the event of an error. Stopped IDocs are checked by a clerk and then released manually if necessary. After the order data is forwarded by the web application to SAP S/4HANA, it is checked again and, if successful, created as an SAP transport order or entered in an IDoc error list for further processing.