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    What is EDI? What does it do?

    • Article Type: General
    • Product: Aleph
    • Product Version: 18.01

    Description:
    I'm not familiar with EDI. What does it do for us? What do we need to have on our end for it to work (order records or just catalog records, etc.).

    Resolution:
    EDI is a method for exchanging acquisitions data electronically with your Vendor. You create your Orders in ALEPH - pretty much in the usual way. But if the supplier supports EDI, then you just need to run a batch job (p-edi-11) that gathers all the new Orders for that Vendor, converts them to the EDI format, and ftp's them directly to the Vendor's system.

    The real time savings is when the Vendor sends you the Invoice using EDI. You get the Invoice from the Vendor via ftp, and then a batch procedure (p-edi-09/p-edi-10) in ALEPH creates the ALEPH Invoice, all of the associated Line Items for the corresponding Orders, and the Budget Transactions.

    The system can also send Claims for unreceived materials using the same EDI ftp process.

    There are now some variations that sites are using to order materials. The library places their Orders directly on the Vendor's web site. Then the Vendor sends a file of Bib record for ordered material, along with Order information. These are then batch loaded (using p_file_96) into ALEPH, eliminating the need for one-by-one creation of Orders in ALEPH, as well as the need for creating Bib records manually. Then the Vendor usually sends an EDI Invoice for those items, which is processed by the standard ALEPH EDI load procedure.

    All of this in dependent on what your Vendor/Supplier supports.


    • Article last edited: 10/8/2013