Founded in 1993 and headquartered in Richmond, Virginia, EDI Partners is a leading electronic data interchange (EDI) services provider. With a comprehensive offering including EDI managed services, systems consulting, and project execution, the company helps companies across a wide range of industries to deliver reliable EDI capabilities while reducing cost and complexity.
Jonathan Crawford, VP of Operations at EDI Partners, says: “One of our biggest focus areas is EDI managed services — essentially, EDI outsourcing for our customers. We support our customers with a wide range of use cases, including inventory management, shipping, payroll processing, and more.”
EDI Partners provides mission-critical capabilities for its customers, helping them to do everything from delivering products to retailers to paying employees on time. Because the company is tightly integrated into its customers’ core business processes, stability and availability are both critical requirements for the EDI platform that underpins its services.
“Our previous EDI technology platform was approaching end of life,” Crawford continues. “We looked for a solution that would deliver rock-solid reliability for our core EDI workloads, as well as support for the X12 and EDIFACT standards. In recent years, we’ve seen significant and growing demand for API-enabled services. So, we also wanted a technology platform that supported REST API integration.”
After evaluating EDI solutions from several leading vendors, EDI Partners selected Axway B2B Integration. A proven solution trusted by some of the world’s largest enterprises, B2B Integration supports a wide range of integration patterns — including EDI and API use cases.
“In addition to meeting our immediate B2B communications needs, I wanted to consider our possible future requirements and ensure our chosen solution would stand the test of time,” comments Crawford. “As well as being extremely robust and reliable, we felt that Axway B2B Integration offers the breadth and depth of functionality we need to support current and next-generation integration use cases for our customers.”
Working with support from Axway, EDI Partners is migrating its B2B integrations from its legacy EDI platform to B2B Integration.
“One of the capabilities of B2B Integration that we find really valuable is the map designer,” adds Crawford. “The Axway solution makes defining, testing, and deploying new maps very straightforward, whether they are for traditional EDI standards or newer API JSON formats. Within the next 12 to 18 months, we plan to decommission our legacy platform, at which point we will use the Axway solution for all our B2B integration requirements.”
To build on its success with B2B Integration, EDI Partners is preparing to deploy Axway Sentinel — a real-time event monitoring solution for B2B flows.
“With Sentinel dashboards, we will be able to put fine-grained data on EDI transactions right at our customers’ fingertips,” says Crawford. “We are confident that Sentinel will ultimately help us to reduce inquiries to our helpdesk, as customers will be able to track the status of all their B2B transactions in one place.”
Since deploying B2B Integration, EDI Partners has significantly enhanced its service offering. The company can now onboard new trading partners in a matter of days — almost 80 percent faster than before.
“Now that we’ve built up in-depth knowledge in B2B Integration, it’s even faster and easier for us to set up new trading partners in the solution,” confirms Crawford. “Speed is an important differentiator for us, as many of our competitors take weeks or even months to perform the same work.”
As it finalizes its transition to B2B Integration and Sentinel, EDI Partners knows it can count on Axway for timely support and guidance.
“Our team has worked with many B2B integration vendors, and we’ve found that high-quality support is a rare thing,” comments Crawford. “We’ve used B2B Integration to support some very demanding use cases, and we’ve yet to find a situation where the solution can’t handle our requirements. With Axway, we can always reach out and get the technical assistance we need. The team has been on hand to help us whenever we’ve needed them, and Axway continues to be an amazing partner to work with.”
Looking ahead, EDI Partners plans to explore Amplify API Management to help enhance and streamline its approach to API integration.
“We see a big opportunity to use Amplify API Management to save time and reduce back-end complexity,” concludes Crawford. “Axway solutions are at the heart of our business, and we’re looking forward to finding new and better ways to use them to deliver EDI services to our customers.”
Integrate and orchestrate all B2B, EDI, and MFT data exchanges with API-powered B2B integration.
