AWS B2B Data Interchange FAQs

Automate and transform Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) documents at scale

General

AWS B2B Data Interchange is a fully managed service for automating the transformation of Electronic Interchange Data (EDI) documents into common data representations, such as JSON and XML. Customers across verticals that exchange transactional data, such as pharmaceuticals, industrial machinery, automotive, financial services, and insurance can use B2B Data Interchange. Reduce the time, complexity, and cost associated with preparing and integrating transactional B2B data into your business applications and purpose-built data lakes on AWS.
Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, is the computer-to-computer exchange of business documents in a standard electronic format. EDI is used to exchange transactional data with trading partners by customers across a wide variety of industries, such as pharmaceuticals, industrial machinery, automotive, financial services, and insurance.

B2B Data Interchange allows you to onboard, manage, and monitor your entire network of trading partner relationships from a centralized dashboard. The service supports communication mechanisms for exchanging data with trading partners. You have the option to transform incoming EDI documents into standard or customized JSON and XML formats using the service’s mapping template editor. Custom mappings can be reused across multiple partners or associated with individual relationships. This allows you to tailor the transformation of your EDI documents based on which partner you’ve received the documents from and how the data will be used. Once the transformed data is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), you can automate your downstream data integrations and shift resources back to the value-added work that drives meaningful business impact. Detailed logs of your transformation activities are delivered to Amazon CloudWatch, providing you with full operational visibility to track usage, detect anomalies, and troubleshoot errors.

In a few quick steps, you can start automating the transformation of your EDI documents with B2B Data Interchange. First, visit the AWS Management Console to sign up for B2B Data Interchange. Then, create a business profile with contact information for your organization. Next, configure a transformer with details about the type of EDI documents to be transformed and whether the output format should be JSON or XML. You can also customize the output formatting by editing the JSON or XML mapping template from the transformer’s configuration page. Finally, you create a trading capability that specifies the input and output directories in Amazon S3. Once a trading capability has been created, it can be associated with one or more partnerships.
Today, we support X12 EDI documents. For a full list of the X12 document numbers and versions supported, visit our documentation.
You can use B2B Data Interchange to exchange documents that conform to X12 standards, commonly used for supply chain transactions. Examples include purchase orders (EDI 850), acknowledgements (EDI 855), advance shipment notifications (EDI 856), and shipment status notifications (EDI 214). B2B Data Interchange will provide a user interface and API-based mapper to specify how you want fields translated between formats used by your internal business systems (ERP, transportation management systems) to externally exchanged formats. You can customize the document structure and formats and optionally provide validation rules that are run during run time.
You can use the AWS Transfer Family fully managed SFTP, FTPS, and AS2 capabilities to receive EDI documents that are generated from your trading partner’s business systems. EDI documents received using the connectivity capabilities of Transfer Family are automatically uploaded to Amazon S3, where they can then be transformed into JSON- and XML-formatted outputs using B2B Data Interchange. Alternatively, you can use any other any other EDI connectivity tool to upload EDI documents to Amazon S3.

Business partner onboarding and management

A partnership is a dedicated resource that establishes a relationship between you and a specific trading partner. Partnerships contain details about the individual trading partner, the types of EDI documents you receive from them, and how those documents should be transformed into JSON or XML formats.
Using B2B Data Interchange, you can onboard your trading partners and start exchanging transactional B2B data with them using any communication protocol or connectivity tool of your choice. You can then automatically transform the EDI documents received from your partners into standard or customized JSON and XML formats using the service’s mapping template editor. This allows you to tailor the transformation of your EDI documents based on which partner you’ve received the documents from and how the data will be used. Detailed logs of your transformation activities with partners are delivered to CloudWatch, providing you with full operational visibility to track usage, detect anomalies, and troubleshoot errors.
B2B Data Interchange allows you to onboard, manage, and monitor your entire network of trading partner relationships from a centralized dashboard. To onboard a trading partner, you create a partnership. To create a partnership, you must first create a profile, transformer, and trading capability. You can add multiple trading capabilities to a partnership based on the number and types of EDI documents you receive from them. Document transformations related to a specific trading partner are logged in CloudWatch, providing you with full operational visibility to track usage, detect anomalies, and troubleshoot errors.

A transformation is a conversion of one document format to another. B2B Data Interchange has two distinct transformation types, or transformation steps. The first is the EDI to JSON or XML step. This transformation step is used to translate EDI document inputs into the service’s default JSON- or XML-formatted outputs. The second is the JSON-to-JSON or XML-to-XML step. This step is used when a custom mapping has been applied to the transformation. Custom mappings are used to transform the service’s default JSON- or XML-formatted outputs into custom JSON or XML outputs based on your use case and needs.

Yes. You can transform EDI documents based on who you’re receiving them from by applying a transformer with a custom mapping to an individual partnership. In doing so, you can transform your EDI documents in different ways based on who you’ve received the documents from and how the data will be used.

Security

Both your EDI document inputs as well as your transformed JSON- and XML-formatted outputs are stored in Amazon S3. You define the input and output directories in Amazon S3 when creating or editing a trading capability. By default, Amazon S3 resources—buckets, objects, and related subresources—are private: only the resource owner—an AWS account that created it—can access the resource.
B2B Data Interchange provides built-in security features to help you maintain more secure and compliant control over your data. You can also use the multiple data encryption options in Amazon S3 to ensure that both your EDI document inputs and transformed JSON- and XML-formatted outputs are secure and encrypted at rest. Amazon S3 automatically encrypts object uploads to buckets. Refer to Amazon S3 documentation for more information on protecting data with encryption.

Pricing

With B2B Data Interchange, there are no resources to manage and no upfront costs. You pay only for the number of active partnerships maintained and number of transformation steps used, in addition to charges for the corresponding storage. For more information on pricing, visit B2B Data Interchange pricing.