Stedi: Building Blocks for Building High-Volume EDI Integrations

Traditionally, businesses looking to solve EDI & B2B integration needs are limited by choice; they can buy a “full service” EDI system by purchasing on-premise licenses from legacy EDI providers, outsource the entire integration to a managed service provider, or create a mailbox on a value-added network (VAN). These options, while they are the mainstay of the EDI industry, deprive software developers of the myriad of benefits brought by modern, cloud-based systems that most software developers are using. These developers often require and seek building blocks for developing their own EDI platforms and systems. Additionally, the EDI options available in the market are exorbitantly priced and highly generalized, with minimal leeway for customization, resulting in low-grade flexibility and scaling capabilities. A company that is proactively changing the arena–by offering software developers an extensive portfolio of the basic EDI building blocks they require to develop EDI systems–is the developer platform upstart, stedi.

Software developers from any industry can utilize Stedi’s products and APIs to develop EDI systems using familiar tools that integrate with their existing software development operations. These tools are accessible via APIs that end-users can employ to develop high-volume EDI integrations. The APIs empower users to translate EDI documents to JSON, map the data into any shape they desire, convert files into various file formats, and move the files between various business systems.

One of Stedi’s products, EDI Core, efficiently translates EDI files–X12 and EDIFACT–into JSON, enabling software developers to leverage the data in the format of their choice. EDI Core covers all 30+ X12 releases and 321 transaction sets, and only requires HTTP requests for translating the files. Since EDI files often have an archaic structure and are replete with unusual characters, EDI Core automatically translates them into JSON—popularly referred to by Stedi as JEDI (JSON EDI). Once the file is in the JEDI format, developers can use Mappings to transform this JSON into the shape that their system requires. And lastly, if customers require conversion to or from XML or CSV, Stedi’s Converter API covers that too.

Like most EDI systems, most of the core business logic and transformations happen in the map. Using Stedi’s Mappings user interface, users can define custom mapping rules and use Stedi APIs to automatically map any incoming or outgoing data into the format of their choice. Users can also chain together EDI Core and Mappings to translate the files into JSON or into X12 EDI. Whether a network employs SFTP or AS2, Stedi provides easy-to-use tools to enable the transmission of mapped files to and from various systems, such as Oracle, NetSuite, and SAP.