Is your EDI reliable? A 17-point checklist for suppliers
Reliable EDI isn’t about never failing. It is about catching every failure before it becomes a missed shipment or a chargeback. Tick these off for your own setup.
An EDI setup has four jobs: send documents that are right, prove they arrived, recover when something fails, and notice when something that should happen doesn’t. A gap in any of them ends the same way, with a retailer telling you about a problem you didn’t know you had.
Week 1
Send documents that are right
Week 2
Prove they arrived
Week 3
Recover from failures
Week 4
Notice what didn’t happen
How Weredi covers the list
Documents are validated against your partner’s guide and blocking errors stop the send. Control numbers come from a counter kept for your account. AS2 receipts are checked, 997s go out automatically for every partner you switch it on for, and your partners’ 997s are matched to what you sent. For each partner, you choose whether its files are judged leniently or strictly. Temporary connection errors are retried up to 10 times, and you are alerted when a 997 is overdue, an order is unacknowledged after 24 hours, a ship-by date is two days away, or a shipment has no invoice after a week. The platform itself runs on infrastructure built to keep running.
Questions
What makes an EDI system reliable?
Four things: documents are validated before they are sent, delivery is proven with receipts and 997 acknowledgments, failures are retried and reported, and missing documents trigger alerts before they cost you.
What is an MDN in AS2?
A Message Disposition Notification: the receipt an AS2 receiver sends back to prove the file arrived intact and could be decrypted.
How should failed EDI transmissions be retried?
Automatically for temporary errors such as a timeout, with a fixed limit, and never for configuration errors such as a wrong password, which need a person to fix them.
Keep reading
All articles →Get these checks without building them
Weredi validates every document, tracks every acknowledgment and alerts you when an order stalls, from the first partner.