Connect with Your Trading Partners
Major retailers and 3PL customers don’t give you a choice—EDI is the price of admission. Coles, Woolworths, Bunnings, Metcash, and most large shippers require EDI 204 load tenders, 214 status updates, 856 ASNs, and 210 invoices, and they’ll charge you back every time a document is late, malformed, or missed. Meanwhile, your AP team is re-keying PDFs from partners who haven’t gone EDI yet, and invoices sit in dispute for weeks because nobody notices the mismatch until reconciliation. We build the EDI integration layer that moves documents between your TMS, WMS, and accounting systems and your trading partners—on whichever protocol they need (AS2, SFTP, API)—and layer AI on top of the document flow so non-EDI partners get processed the same way through OCR, and so invoice discrepancies and ASN mismatches get caught the day they happen, not at month-end.
What you get
Meet retailer and customer EDI mandates without a full ERP replacement
Support for ANSI X12 (204, 210, 214, 856, 990) and EDIFACT (IFTMIN, IFTSTA, INVOIC)
Trading-partner onboarding handled end-to-end—maps, testing, sign-off
AI exception detection on invoices and ASNs so chargebacks get caught in hours, not weeks
How operators use this
3PL serving major grocery retailers
Lost two retailer contracts’ worth of margin to chargebacks on late 214 status messages. We deployed an AS2 integration with automatic status triggers from their TMS, added AI monitoring on outbound 856 ASNs to catch missing fields before transmission, and cut chargebacks 85% in the first quarter.
Freight forwarder with mixed EDI / PDF partners
Half their customers sent EDI 210 invoices, half sent PDFs via email. AP team re-keyed PDFs manually and missed reconciliation errors until month-end. We built a unified intake pipeline—EDI on one side, AI OCR on the other—that normalises everything into the same invoice workflow and flags discrepancies for review within 24 hours.
Frequently asked questions
- What is EDI integration in logistics?
- EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) integration is the automated exchange of standardised business documents—load tenders, status updates, shipping notices, invoices—between your systems and your trading partners’ systems. In Australian logistics it’s typically ANSI X12 (for US-linked retailers) or EDIFACT (for European and international freight), moved over AS2, SFTP, or a VAN.
- Which EDI documents do most Australian logistics companies need?
- The most common are EDI 204 (load tender), 214 (shipment status), 856 (Advance Shipping Notice / ASN), 210 (freight invoice), and 990 (response to load tender). For grocery retail, ASN 856 compliance is particularly critical—Coles, Woolworths, Metcash, and Bunnings all mandate it and charge back on errors.
- Do I need a VAN (Value Added Network) or can we connect directly?
- Both work. A VAN (like SPS Commerce or TrueCommerce) handles trading-partner onboarding and document translation for you at a per-transaction fee. Direct AS2 or SFTP connections are cheaper long-term but require you to manage partner maps and certificates. We work with whichever fits your partner mix and transaction volume—most mid-market logistics operators run a hybrid.
- How do you handle trading partners who don’t support EDI?
- We layer AI OCR on top of the same pipeline. PDF invoices, emailed POs, and paper BOLs get extracted by the AI document intelligence layer and normalised into the same internal format as EDI documents. Your AP team sees one unified queue instead of managing EDI and manual processing separately.
- How long does EDI integration take to set up?
- A first trading-partner connection is typically 4–6 weeks (mapping, testing, sign-off). Additional partners after the initial setup are 1–3 weeks each because the infrastructure and document maps are reusable. Full replacement of a manual AP process across 10–20 partners usually takes 3–4 months.
- What’s the AI layer actually doing on top of EDI?
- Three things: OCR on non-EDI documents so partners who still send PDFs flow through the same pipeline; anomaly detection on invoices and ASNs so chargebacks and reconciliation errors get caught in hours rather than month-end; and trading-partner map generation—feeding a new partner’s sample documents into an LLM to draft the initial mapping instead of writing it by hand.
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