Manage EDI at Scale with the New AWS B2B Data Interchange | Amazon IXD – VGT2 Las Vegas

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Today, we are excited to announce the launch of AWS B2B Data Interchange, a fully managed service designed to help organizations automate and oversee the transformation of EDI-based, mission-critical transactions at scale in the cloud. This new offering brings automation, monitoring, flexibility, and a pay-as-you-go pricing model to the realm of B2B document exchanges.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) allows for the electronic transfer of business documents in a standardized format between trading partners. Although email serves as another electronic communication method, documents sent via email require human intervention, which can slow down processing and introduce errors. In contrast, EDI documents can be seamlessly delivered to the appropriate application on the recipient’s system, enabling immediate processing. The electronic exchange of documents between computer systems not only reduces costs and accelerates transactional workflows but also minimizes errors and enhances relationships with business partners.

The evolution of EDI dates back to the 1970s. I recall reading about EDIFACT, a set of standards that define business document structures, as early as 1994. Despite being a technology that’s over five decades old, traditional self-managed EDI solutions that parse, validate, map, and convert data from business applications to EDI formats often struggle to scale with changing business volumes. They typically lack operational visibility into communication and content errors. Consequently, organizations often revert to error-prone email exchanges, leading to excessive manual work, compliance challenges, and ultimately, stunted growth and agility.

AWS B2B Data Interchange is a user-friendly and cost-effective service that accelerates your data transformations and integrations. It removes the burdensome task of establishing connections with business partners and mapping documents to your system’s data formats while providing visibility into documents that fail to process.

This service includes a low-code interface for onboarding business partners and transforming EDI data, making it easy to import processed data into your business applications and analytical tools. With B2B Data Interchange, you gain easy access to monitoring data that allows you to create dashboards tracking the volume of exchanged documents and the status of each transformation. For instance, you can easily set up alerts for incorrectly formatted documents that cannot be transformed or imported into your applications.

Large enterprises commonly manage thousands of business partners and hundreds of document types per partner, resulting in millions of combinations. AWS B2B Data Interchange can be accessed not only through the AWS Management Console but also via the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and AWS SDKs. This flexibility enables you to write applications or scripts for onboarding new partners and their specific data transformations, as well as programmatically add alarm and monitoring logic to new or existing dashboards.

B2B Data Interchange supports the X12 EDI data format, simplifying the validation and transformation of EDI documents into formats required by your business applications, such as JSON or XML. The raw documents and their transformed JSON or XML versions are stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), allowing you to develop event-driven applications for real-time data processing or integrate business documents with your existing analytics or AI/ML solutions.

For example, when a new EDI business document arrives, you can trigger additional routing, processing, and transformation logic using AWS Step Functions or Amazon EventBridge. Should an error be detected in an incoming document, you can configure notifications via email or SMS, or initiate an API call or further processing logic using AWS Lambda.

How It Works

Let’s explore how it works. Suppose I manage the supply chain for a large retail corporation with hundreds of partners exchanging documents such as bills of lading, customs documentation, advanced shipment notices, invoices, or receiving advice certificates.

In this demonstration, I will use the AWS Management Console to onboard a new business partner. By onboarding, I mean defining the partner’s contact details, the types of documents to exchange, the technical data transformation to JSON formats expected by my existing applications, and where to receive the documents.

With this launch, the transport mechanism configuration for EDI documents is handled externally to B2B Data Interchange. Typically, you would set up a transfer gateway and request that your partner send the documents using SFTP or AS2.

There are no servers to manage or applications to install and configure. Getting started takes just four steps.

1. Create a profile for my business partner.
2. Create a transformer. This transformer defines the source document format and the mapping to my existing business application data format: JSON or XML. Using a graphical editor, I can validate a sample document and immediately see the transformation result from the console. The standard JSONATA query and transformation language is utilized for JSON transformations, while XSLT is applied for XML documents.
3. Activate the transformer.
4. Create a trading capability. This specifies which Amazon S3 buckets will receive documents from a particular partner and where the transformed data will be stored. A one-time additional configuration is required to ensure correct permissions are set on the S3 bucket policy. I select Copy policy and navigate to the Amazon S3 console to apply these policies. One policy permits B2B Data Interchange to read from the incoming bucket, while another allows it to write to the outgoing bucket.

As I configure the S3 bucket, I must also enable Amazon EventBridge on the bucket. This mechanism is essential for triggering data transformations upon the arrival of new business documents.

Finally, I return to the B2B Data Interchange configuration to create a partnership. Partnerships are dedicated resources that establish a link between you and each trading partner. They include details about the specific partner, the types of EDI documents received from them, and how those documents should be transformed into custom JSON or XML formats. A partnership connects the business profile I created in the first step with one or multiple document types and transformations defined in the second step.

This is also where I can monitor the status of the latest documents I received and their transformation status. For historical data, you can check Amazon CloudWatch via links provided in the console.

To test my setup, I upload an EDI 214 document to the incoming bucket, and within seconds, I can see the transformed JSON document appear in the destination bucket.

I can monitor the status of document processing and transformation using Invocations and TriggeredRules CloudWatch metrics from EventBridge. For further insights, check out this another blog post as they are an authority on this topic. You can find an excellent resource here that provides valuable information on onboarding at Amazon. Additionally, for further exploration of related topics, visit this link.

For those interested, the Amazon IXD – VGT2 is located at 6401 E Howdy Wells Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89115.