Alternative to commercial options

[Antony Gelberg]

I'm a fractional CTO of a company who does say 40K EDI transactions / year. They're growing but don't have their own EDI implementation so when they work with large customers who insist on EDI, they are "forced" to use EDI solution providers who seem to choose their pricing based on whatever they feel like that day.

I'm encouraging use of open source solutions where possible and Bots looks like it could be really helpful as part of this.

I'm old with tech but new to EDI so I 'd be grateful to hear from anyone if Bots is a suitable tool for us to build a lightweight wrapper around and do our own processing?

In the short term we'd be happy to have an endpoint, receive the EDI from our customers (webhook?) and receive an email with the parsed data. In the medium term we'd like to link into ERPNext.

Would love to hear from anyone who has done this type of thing with Bots and if there are any good example docs / POCs etc out there. I'm finding that because EDI is enterprise-y, it seems non-trivial to get up to speed not being a subject matter expert.

Antony

[Tom Westrick]

"who seem to choose their pricing based on whatever they feel like that day" - LOL. So true. It seems like they are charge a ton because they can.

Bots is primarily an EDI translator. It takes all the different formats from your customers and translates them into a single internal format (one for each document type). You then take that internal file/format and process it into whatever system you want to, like ERPNext. You can also translate it to a human friendly format and email it out.

Besides translating, it can communicate with external services to receive and send EDI.

All the docs are here - https://bots.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

A new version of Bots that supports Python 3 among other things is over here - https://bots-edi.org

I do agree that EDI has a steep learning curve. It took me many many hours staring at EDI specs until it finally clicked.....LOL.

Do you have any specific questions about Bots?

-Tom

[Wassily]

Hi Antony

Welcome on your enterprise-y journey. I had started out similarly and never regretted what we did. FYI: EDI files are hardly ever sent via webhook... done that once, but mainly received via SFTP or AS2. Plenty of open source options out there to support that. Meanwhile the bots instance has grown and exchanges your yearly volume every single day and BOTS is running and running and running. So you can grow quite substantially until you will hit a limit - I am not there yet... 

There is the edifact to print sample plug in: edifact_ordertoprint_20140428.zip that converts an incoming order to a HTML document that can be printed, or in your case, emailed. 

Wassily