Why did we build EDI Dashboard?

Published on : Jun 6, 2018

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Lex

Author

Why do we need this feature?

Many customers use their BizTalk platform to exchange EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) messages with their partners. BizTalk Server contains a number of features for EDI like Interchange processing, Batch processing and Trading Partner Management. From an operational viewpoint, all kind of features exist in BizTalk Server and many have found their way to BizTalk360 as well. However, besides querying for running processes, there is no feature which shows the EDI processes from a statistical viewpoint.

What are the current challenges?

Often, BizTalk Server is considered as a black box and organizations with little knowledge of the product, sometimes prefer not to touch it. This behaviour can be quite dangerous as the (EDI) processes in BizTalk Server might not run as expected. So, insight into these processes is required to be able to guarantee everything is okay. Information like the number of AS2 messages or the transaction count by transaction type or by partner id over a certain period is very useful to determine the well-being of the processes, but cannot be revealed from BizTalk Server.

How BizTalk360 solves this problem?

BizTalk360 tries to breach this black box behaviour by bringing a platform which makes BizTalk Server environments easier to understand and safe to operate on. Related to EDI, we bring a couple of features:
  • EDI Dashboards
  • EDI Status Reports
  • Reporting Manager
  • Parties and Agreements

EDI Dashboards

The EDI Dashboard is one of the features which enables the BizTalk user to get insight in what’s going in BizTalk. As the other dashboards in BizTalk360, also the EDI Dashboard is customizable and consists of widgets from different categories. In case of the EDI Dashboard, the following categories exist:
  • EDI Interchanges – widgets exist for
    • Interchange count by Partner Id/Name
    • Agreement
    • Encoding (X12/EDIFACT)
  • EDI Transaction Sets – widgets exist for
    • Transaction count by Partner Id/Name
    • Transaction type (filtered by Partner Id)
    • ACK Status (filtered by Partner Id)
  • EDI AS – widgets exist for
    • Number of messages by Partner Id
    • Number of messages by Partner Id and MDN status
    • Number of messages by MDN status
Below you can view some examples of EDI Dashboards you can create in BizTalk360. The EDI Dashboard   The EDI Dashboard   The EDI Dashboard

EDI Reports

Comparable to the EDI query features in the BizTalk Administration Console, BizTalk360 brings a Reporting feature. On top of the set of queries you might know from the Admin console, BizTalk360 also provides a Functional ACK Status report.

EDI Reporting Manager

For easy configuration of your EDI reports, BizTalk360 brings the EDI Reporting Manager. See below for a screen print of that feature.

Parties and Agreements

Also the parties and agreements can be viewed in BizTalk360. See below for a screen print of that feature. By bringing all these features, BizTalk360 gives good visibility of the EDI processes.