An EDI gateway customers can fix themselves

The problem

Order files arrive in every shape. A customer changes a column. A system adds a blank line. A file lands half-written. The import fails, and the customer finds out when their orders don't go out, often late on a Friday afternoon.

Then comes the argument: what did they actually send? Without the original file, exactly as it arrived, nobody can prove it either way. The warehouse says the file was wrong. The customer says it wasn't.

What I built

A customer EDI gateway portal, designed and built by me and running in the cloud.

• Customers drop order files the way that suits them: FTP, SFTP or upload in the browser.
• Every file is kept byte-for-byte, exactly as it arrived, with a format fingerprint. It's provable, and it's replayable.
• Preflight checks read each file before it's imported and tell the customer, in plain words, why it would fail.
• The customer can then fix the file themselves and send it again.
• Each customer has their own pages and their own logins.
• Each user has a dashboard of cards they can drag into the order they want.

How it runs now

Customers send files the way they already do. When a file is wrong, they see why and fix it, without a phone call to the warehouse and without someone in the office editing it by hand.

When there's a question about what was sent, the original file is there, byte-for-byte, with its fingerprint. It can be replayed to show exactly what happened.

The customer gets an answer from the gateway itself, at the moment they send the file. That's the point: the person who can fix the file is the person who finds out it's wrong.