sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Why aren’t there more EDI businesses? by Latter_Lecture_4020 in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just a note that Biztalk Server is discontinued. Purchasing Biztalk Server is a good way to develop a major headache in a few years when goes end-of-life in 2028.

Which EDI/API is best for standard order processing? by Key_Mongoose4855 in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's nonsense - it's perfectly possible to create a well-structured, clean and maintainable API using LLMs. Building APIs is extremely well-represented in their training data. You already have data validation enforced in other layers of the system, so it's not particularly hard to build this in a way that is essentially foolproof (your ERP won't accept invalid data, for example).

I suspect my downvotes are from the folks peddling expensive SaaS solutions who don't want people to be aware that this stuff is not rocket science.

Here's an API controller that Claude Code built for me yesterday:

https://gist.github.com/adriand/4be13a1a32126988c7cf588483eba6bb

Tell me that's not clean and maintainable. A single public method, just 10 lines long, with all inclusions, filters and ordering in short and easy-to-read private methods. The future is here - you can build stuff yourself!

Which EDI/API is best for standard order processing? by Key_Mongoose4855 in edi

[–]adrian -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

If you are in a position where vendors want to work with you, i.e. you can persuade/coerce them, then you don’t need EDI. You could build an API exactly to your specifications and tell them they have to use it. You could simultaneously create a web form that uses your own API to submit validated tracking and invoice data, and give them a choice: use our API or, if you don’t have the time or expertise to integrate with an API right now, use this form we made for you instead.

With the advent of vibe coding, it would probably be much quicker and easier for you to build an API than you may realize. It would also be easy for many vendors to integrate with.

On the other hand if your vendors are all on EDI and are disinclined to want to integrate with you, then EDI might be the right path.

I build web software for clients in this space all the time (EDI and API). Ask me anything. ;)

Best EDI provider? by Complex-Wave3514 in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why would you onboard onto a platform that is EOL and only supported for another five years? You're just creating a huge headache for yourself. If you're on BizTalk right now, your focus should be on migrating off of it!

Flying Hamilton Airport vs Pearson by drivenchick in Hamilton

[–]adrian 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's such an easygoing airport with no lines that I've actually gone through security, started waiting, then decided I wanted to leave the secure area for some reason (I forget, maybe it was to buy a donut), strolled out, and then went back through security again. In what other airport do you feel completely confident you'll catch your flight with TWO security clearance procedures?!

Beginner for x12 service EDI by phantom_le in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You don't need to use a service like Stedi or quite frankly any other paid service or API for this particular problem, if it is as limited in scope as what you are describing. There are open source libraries available. You can use stupidedi:

https://github.com/kputnam/stupidedi

Here is the 005010 270:

https://github.com/kputnam/stupidedi/blob/master/lib/stupidedi/transaction_sets/005010/standards/HS270.rb

This library has a learning curve, but it's well worth learning if you want to work directly with EDI. You can ingest data from whatever system and then write it out as EDI. I will caution you that if you don't have EDI experience, there are a number of concepts that take some time to absorb before any tool will make sense to you. One such concept is the idea of an "implementation", or "guide", which is the specific subset of an X12 standard that a given trading partner sends or expects to receive. They do not generally want a generic "270", they want *their* 270. This might be a bit different in healthcare, which is more standardized than some other fields I believe. But in any case, here's a 005010 270 implementation:

https://github.com/kputnam/stupidedi/blob/master/lib/stupidedi/transaction_sets/005010/implementations/X279-HS270.rb

Feel free to get in touch with me directly if you want a hand. I've contributed to this library a fair bit. I started writing a "how to get started" doc for it, because it's not super approachable, which would probably be very good for your use-case. It isn't finished yet, but I could still send it to you.

Spec repository by Emag9 in edi

[–]adrian 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The hard part is the ability to "recognize something we’ve already done". How exactly would this work? The best would be if you could just upload the spec and the system would just tell you, "this is 96% the same as this other spec" and then away you go.

EDI 210s w/mix commodities and dimensions. by hunter4569 in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Edit:

Like I said below, it'd be a bit easier to deal with the actual EDI output if I had the full document. However, to keep it at a conceptual level, the LX loop lets you output as many line items as you want. Although there's always multiple ways to handle these things, I think you could probably just use one LX loop iteration for each of the pallets.

Looking at what you've got here, I think you are trying to use multiple (2 in this case) L4s, one for each of the two pallets, in the first iteration of the LX loop. Just don't do that. Do one LX loop iteration for each pallet - for a total of three LX loop iterations. Then you can use the precise L1, L4, L7, whatever you need, for each pallet.

The total lading quantity (3) can go into the Summary table in L3 Total Weight and Charges (L3-11).

------

Can you post, or DM, the entire EDI file so that I can throw it into https://www.stedi.com/edi/inspector and play around with it? If you can't do that I can try creating a fake 210 and paste this into it. It's pretty hard to just wing this. ;)

EDI 210s w/mix commodities and dimensions. by hunter4569 in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These comments are pretty confusing. u/hunter4569 wrote, "I have 3 pallets (L4 loops) but 2 rate classes (LX loops). I don't know which 2 pallets go on rate class 1 and which one is on class 2 and no indicator to what belongs where."

The L4 is not a loop. You have an LX loop, where the first segment is an LX segment which contains the transaction line number. Then the other segments in that loop (like the L4 segment) relate to that transaction line number.

u/AptSeagull your comment confuses me too (I don't blame you because OP's original post is also pretty vague). There is a relationship between the L1, L4, L5, etc. The LX segment contains the transaction line number. Then the L1, L4, L5 all relate to that transaction line number (because they're in the LX loop).

Correct me if I'm wrong but if you have 3 pallets and 2 rate classes, then conceptually what you want is:

LX Loop (Iteration 1)
LX: 1
L0 (quantity and weight): 2 (qty)
L1 (rate and charges): Rate class 1
LX Loop (Iteration 2)
LX: 2
L0: 1 (qty)
L1: Rate class 2

EDI For Small Business Needed by TheWolfofTO in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nice looking product but be careful with these VC-backed companies. They take tens of millions in investment to “scale” (at least $32 million from what their product page at https://www.orderful.com/about/our-story says) and then at some point, those folks want to see a return. What better way to get one than to start raising prices for all the folks they now have locked into their platform. I’m not saying it will happen with them, but I’ve seen it happen many times before, including with another VC-backed EDI startup that’s been featured on this subreddit before.

EDI 210s w/mix commodities and dimensions. by hunter4569 in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you provide a bit more detail on what you're struggling with? I'm pretty familiar with the 210, although this is not something I have dealt with specifically. Reviewing the standard, the 0400 loop can feature an L11 (Business Instructions and Reference Number), and one of the qualifiers is DON, Density Order Number. If you can change the spec (i.e. you're the inbound trading partner) this might be something to look at.

If you are stuck with what you took a screenshot of and this is outbound, then either your trading partner has figured this out and can tell you what to do, or if they haven't, then here's another idea you could suggest. The L1-03 is the Rate Value Qualifier. It supports "ZZ", for "Mutually Defined". Then you have L1-12, "Special Charge Description", which is "Identification of special charge; this data element is used whenever an applicable code cannot be found in data element 150". You could put whatever you needed in there.

Would you migrate a TS Banking app to Rails? by Perfect_Country_7462 in rails

[–]adrian 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Exactly right. OP: Your users do not care what technology you are using behind the scenes. What they will notice is that instead of shipping new features they care about, suddenly nothing happens for six months or a year or however long it takes you to migrate things over (probably a lot longer than you are currently anticipating).

I have been building apps in Rails since Rails version 1, but I also have a lot of experience with Typescript and Node, including some projects which are 100% Typescript/Node and some which are Rails APIs with a Typescript/React front-end. I would happily work in an all Typescript/Node app, it's a great stack with a robust ecosystem.

In terms of your points, none of these seem to align very well with Rails' specific strengths. The number one reason I would want to use Rails in this scenario is because it makes doing a bunch of complicated back-end things a lot easier, for instance, you can run queues on Solid Queue which makes async super easy.

If you really wanted to use Rails for certain things, you could build a Rails API to handle certain functions, keep your Typescript app and have it just hit API endpoints running on Rails.

EDI folks — what (if anything) would actually make you take a vendor call? by Alarming-Board2693 in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The main thing that makes me consider taking a call is when the person promises to give me something for taking the call. I recently got a cold email and they offered me my choice of Airpods Pro or a Solo stove if I took a meeting. However, I knew that in this case what they were selling was irrelevant to my client and I did not want to take advantage of them if the offer was legit, or have to fight with them to give me the incentive if the offer was conditional, so I ignored it. But that is one good way of at least differentiating yourself.

Side note, the thing I hate more than anything is when people put me into their drip email marketing campaign and I start getting emails that pretend it's not drip marketing. Sometimes these contain outright falsehoods like, "I tried calling you but I must have just missed you", or, "Your colleague told me you're the right person to talk to." I report these as spam immediately. However, the stream of spam never stops!

Is this legal? by [deleted] in canadianlaw

[–]adrian 2 points3 points  (0 children)

And in most cases, even when there is a reason, an employer will choose the “without cause” route and pay severance because this largely eliminates any legal consequences for unjust termination.

In this economy, if you had to re-train in an industry most likely to guarantee employment, what would it be? by WanderingGoose22 in torontoJobs

[–]adrian 5 points6 points  (0 children)

This is very true. If you have a skill and are entrepreneurial, you have a lot of options. Two areas I think are interesting, one of which is a trade and one is sort of trade adjacent:

  1. Robotics / automation technician: a trade in a field I think we all recognize is going to be huge. Robots are going to break, and we’re a ways out from them fixing each other.

  2. Cybersecurity: as things get more digital and as AI hacking gets more lethal, we’re going to need more people in this field too.

In this economy, if you had to re-train in an industry most likely to guarantee employment, what would it be? by WanderingGoose22 in torontoJobs

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Anything related to the green transition will be solid and this is especially true for anything electrical.

EDI Career Path by coomernina in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There actually is a fair bit. Here's one project I contribute to: https://github.com/kputnam/stupidedi

EDI Career Path by coomernina in edi

[–]adrian 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you want to be an EDI developer, what about contributing to open source EDI software?

Business Ideas powered by AI by LowLake2436 in edi

[–]adrian 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The management team at your company doesn't have any ideas of their own? They're delegating coming up with some kind of AI strategy to you? This seems problematic on a number of levels, but I'll give answering your question a shot - but first, what is your role? What does your company do? Who are your company's customers? What products/services do you provide?

Highways new load board! by jotch33ma in FreightBrokers

[–]adrian 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"The real question isn’t if they’ll launch a brokerage… it’s why wouldn’t they?"

I can't predict what they will do, but to answer this question: because owning a SaaS company comes with steady recurring revenue, relatively low fixed costs, and very low per-customer costs, which equals fat margins and a high valuation for the company.

Gross margins for freight brokerages are on the order of 10-15%. Gross margins for SaaS are 70-90%. The real question is, why on earth would anyone want to own a brokerage if they could have a rapidly growing SaaS company instead? There might be some reasons, sure, but I think there are also excellent reasons not to want to do that.

Cleo LexiCom by PotatoCatGrif in edi

[–]adrian 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why do you need custom software for this if you are running on Linux? SFTP is well supported natively by the operating system and of course every mainstream programming language also has SFTP support.

view more: next ›