Business Analysts and integration developers know how painful and time consuming it is to understand the complex structures of the EDI documents used by business organizations when they are assigned a task of implementing an EDI document integration with a trading partner. They have to sit with their counterparts on the trading partner's side to understand the overall layout of the document used, the fields used by the trading partner in the document, and then understand the functional context behind usage of each and every field. They reserve couple of weeks to the whole activity which demands dedicated time of several people. This community would be wondering,in the era where mobile phones can read business cards and create contacts,scanners can scan forms and provide the form data content to systems, why is there still not a tool that can read a sample EDI document and understand the whole layout.

Amidst such community is one small group that is not perturbed by any such complexities - The MOND implementation team. MOND, the cloud based integration platform, provides EDI Document Discovery feature. The feature allows the business analysts to upload a sample EDI document of the trading partner and click on a button and Voila! the structure of the EDI document is discovered automatically. Yes, this is not a scanning machine or a mobile card reader App, but certainly makes the discovery of the EDI document layout as easy as any of these technology gadgets. Let me show you how we discover the EDI documents on MOND.

We start with using the MOND Mapping wizard. We enter the name for the Document Type that has to be created by discovering the layout of the EDI document.

We then upload a sample EDI file collected from the trading partner.

There it is, on the screen - the discovered EDI document!

MOND displays the discovery ranking which is the percentage of fields discovered to the total fields in the EDI document as can be seen in the above snapshot. Fields not discovered, if any, will be shown in red color.  The complete document layout is configured in the Document Type definition.

This feature reduces the time to discover the document layout to few minutes from few weeks and hastens the partner onboarding time or the time to implement new document integration for the existing trading partners. It also saves the more purposeful time of several people from being spent on just understanding the document structures during the integration implementation. Perhaps, it is the first and the only integration middleware that provides this useful feature.

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