EDI booking requests and confirmations involve only two parties and have a simple message structure. EDI shipping instructions and bills of lading are more complex, involving four or more parties communicating in a strict format with complex message structures and content that require data conversion between multiple EDI standards.
While it still took us some time to develop the EDI booking solution (EDI 300/301), those are a relatively simple set of EDI transactions, and only two parties are involved. A Cat user populates a web based booking form, mostly pre-populated from Cat’s ordering systems with packing list info, port pair, etc, and when they click ‘Book,’ GT Nexus creates an EDI 300 in their system and sends it to WWL. The WWL system consumes that data, and in turn sends back an EDI 301 booking confirmation.
The EDI 304/310 message set is much more complex, and we also add to the mix two additional parties, though only 3 would be involved for any given transaction. These message sets also have a lot more rules around them, which are mostly driven by WWL, regarding how data is presented in the EDI messages. As info, we have found other carriers are much less strict here…But for this process, which starts after the EDI booking/confirmation has been completed, the first EDI message actually comes from the freight forwarder, so either DHL Peoria or CEVA for machines ex-North America. They send an EDI 304 to GT Nexus, and then GT Nexus rationalizes that data as well as supplements it with some required info WWL needs (party codes for example), and then sends a modified 304 to WWL. WWL processes that 304, adds their bill of lading info and sends an EDI 310 back to GT Nexus. GT Nexus again analyzes the info and makes any required additions and then sends that 310 back to the freight forwarder. There are a lot more touches for these transactions that we had with the EDI 300/301.
