The Road to Smart Logistics

Adeptia’s self-service integration approach enables logistics-focused firms automate transactions processes and expedite the handling of complex EDI messages, minimizing chargebacks, delayed shipments, cancelled orders, and incorrect product costs.

By empowering logistics professionals to easily integrate all the information residing in the transactions in one place, it increases processing speed for enabling faster shipment and delivery. And because those professionals do not have to rely heavily on IT or other technical teams, the complete integration process takes around only a few minutes for completion. Consequently, order-to-cash and purchase-to-pay cycles will witness a steep rise, allowing organizations to foster much smoother relationships with partners and customers. For logistics suppliers, this will mean a more stable business situation due to more timely cash flows, and for the customers, this will yield delightful experiences and faster service. In short, Adeptia’s automated and self-service-based integration solution can help logistics firms utilize transactional data and manage EDI business relationships with third-party logistics companies and freight carriers.

This logistics integration solution comes with a pre-bundled list of EDI standards to process all message types at the speed of business. Along with its user-friendly dashboards, pre-built connectors, shared templates, AI-data mapping, and more, Adeptia provides real-time access to message transaction status, errors related to invalid messages and notifications.

There are several 400 series transactions for EDI, including the EDI 404 Shipment/BOL, the EDI 859  Freight Invoice as well as the EDI 210 Motor Carrier Freight Details and Invoice, EDI 210 Freight Details and Invoice, and Car Location Message (CLM).

CLM is a specific type of EDI message that is employed by the railroad industry to track the movement of railcars. It’s basically an update of the location of rail cars delivered in a single record format, depending on the subject. For instance, there is a basic format, a destination format, flatcar format, ETA format, etc. These are typically fairly straightforward positional files but may contain a lot of code cross-referencing that can be mapped easily with self-service powered Adeptia Connect.

In any partner-management life cycle, onboarding a new trading partner is an important step. A business user from your team can leverage self-service-based, collaborative portal to onboard partners faster by to 80 percent. Once the trading partners are onboarded, users can exchange multiple messages, which they need to ensure are processed successfully according to the agreed-upon SLAs.

The resulting transparency and visibility allow users set up projects and healthy trading partner relationships. These trading partner relationships can be managed through a central repository that allows your team to manage changes and add additional EDI relationships as part of that project.  For example, here is a snapshot of a project belonging to a particular rail carrier. Opening up the relationships category shows the different EDI inbound and outbound messages that are processed for this rail carrier.

Here is a relationship management interface that opens up and shows inbound and outbound message details for each onboarded trading partner:

Adeptia’s logistics integration solution combines process orchestration and workflow in a self-service model thus empowering your business team to access data that they can view, edit, and submit the data back into the process flow after making the corrections – without external support. As an example, rail freight data is shown as a workflow task to a business user through a web form for review and correction.

Managers can view the list of pending workflow tasks and the user performance in terms of how long it is taking to fix data issues.

In routing of data errors to human workflow tasks, the user that is assigned to the task can open the task from their inbox and view the data, make corrections, and resubmit the data for updates.

Here’s an example of a workflow designed in the Adeptia Connect. In this example, we are taking CLM data files from a rail carrier and applying validation rules on the source data. If there are exceptions in the data, those exceptions are routed to a human workflow task else the valid data is being sent to the backend rail shipment tracking system.

And finally Adeptia provides a social B2B data onboarding portal for your clients to send and receive business information through a self-service integration wizard. Your business team can setup pre-built connections for your trading partner network to consume through a secure B2B cloud platform sans IT support. Clients have access to a dashboard to view confirmations that your company has received their data successfully.