Difference between EDI and EDI ECommerce

ttpicasso

New Member
EDI is simply the exchange of data in text form between companies in a pre-defined (standardised) format. ie invoices etc.

EDI commerce is electronic commerce that takes place between enterprises through the medium of EDI.

Commerce is the exchange of items of value between persons or companies. Any exchange of money for a product, service, or information is considered a deal of commerce.

I hope this helps, but it seems to me that the EDI data exchange of information of value would be considered as EDI Commerce.
 

mng

New Member
Hi both,

This is a late reply, but my guess is the request was intended to find the difference between the old "EDI" module in MFG/PRO (available up to version 9.0 or eB) and the new "EDI eCommerce" module in MFG/PRO from version 9.0 onwards (rather than the industry definitions of these terms).

If so, then the old EDI module (menu 35) was only a partial solution requiring some progress code programming to complete the implementation of any EDI message type. Many QAD partners (and QAD regional offices) offered such part-made customisation, often along side with an external mapping/communication system to at least offer a 'complete' end-to-end EDI solution for clients.

The new EDI eCommerce module (initially menu 35.21 but back to menu 35 from eB2 onwards) was a complete fresh approach to this problem space. Rather than providing a hard-coded black-box interface to the ERP (SAP comes to mind), eCommerce provided a highly configurable interface between external message files and the core QAD application. So highly configurable it has been referred to as a mini-programming language in itself but is in fact all edited by means of standard maintenance screens. QAD (and partners) provide a set of pre-configured templates and these can be installed and then tweaked to suit the local issues, the qad.com website used to show a library of such templates (since removed). This module is more complex to learn but has huge advantages, not least that the same solutions can be rolled out in any country, in different QAD versions, with QAD (or many partners), it is not a black box solution, you are not confined to local experts.

The flexibility include choice of many flat file formats; QAD suggests a standard neutral format (SNF) which can be compared to the SAP approach using IDocs. Unlike IDocs, SNF files can be fixed-position or variable-format (or even XML) file, or you can even chose to implement many other formats (may be your legacy file format, may be something close to raw EDI, especially X12 and VDA). Flexibility also extends to the business logic (in or out-bound) and even choices on how to created the MFG/PRO transactions (eg multiple Sales Order created from a single inbound Purchase Order; the X12 850 SDQ being the classic example which is VERY easy to impl with eCommerce).

I don't apologise for the above sounding like a very positive sales pitch - but I worked with this module for many years (inside QAD and at users) and there is nothing to touch its capability even ERPs costing many times more.
 
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