Global Industries

Edifecs Ramp Management provides a branded, self-service portal to onboard trading partners that reduces the resources, time and cost needed to integrate partners, while enhancing partner support and reducing the risk of errors in production. Ramp Management reduces onboarding costs by letting partners perform testing and troubleshooting functions. It shortens the time to production by providing a best-practice onboarding process, the ability for partners to quickly self-test, and an extensive knowledgebase and validation reports to support troubleshooting and issue resolution. Ramp Management improves partner support through use of an issue management system and access to a resource library. It also reduces the risk of errors in production through use of a robust onboarding process and the ability to test against customized guidelines.

Companies today spend hundreds of person-days and countless resources working with their submitters to set up and test each online process before any production transactions ever take place. Whether creating and/or agreeing on standards for claims, eligibility inquiries, or a claims attachments, IT departments must perform the same series of manual functions — often done by e-mail, telephone or fax — for each transaction with every partner. This creates a number of challenges:

• Many organizations are faced with ramping up hundreds or even thousands of new submitters to send X12, EDIFACT, XML and other electronic documents.
• Testing and production environments are not totally in-sync, nor are they highly predictive of trading partner success.
• Many trading partners are not compliant with your specific business data requirements.
• Testing has become a highly manual, complicated and expensive proposition.
• The quality of data files continues to be an issue for production.
• Targets, resources, and deadlines simply do not add up.
• Current solutions are not flexible, and do not allow easy management of companion guide edits and business edits at all levels in a way that ensures compliance and transaction throughput.

As companies trade many different document types, often each with their own varying requirements, this significant cost and time investment limits the achievement of significant and timely ROI. Manual enablement creates a huge bottleneck preventing many companies from realizing the potential gains in productivity and lowered costs that B2B transactions can deliver. Automation of this process is a critical success factor for organizations to achieve a cost and service competitive advantage in their marketplace.

Edifecs, the leading provider of B2B solutions for transaction-based interoperability, addresses the challenges of EDI partner enablement with Edifecs Ramp Management, the market-leading solution for end-to-end on-boarding and testing that mirrors your production environment. Edifecs Ramp Management ensures operational interoperability with trading partners by allowing you to quickly ramp them up and test with them through all of your business scenarios, as well as effectively manage them in the face of changing standards and requirements.

Edifecs Ramp Management automates the testing and implementation process, reducing the time and resources required for achieving transaction interoperability with your trading partner community. Edifecs Ramp Management is the most widely deployed community enablement solution on the market today, with dozens of successful private and public organizations realizing tremendous operational efficiencies, all while increasing transaction throughput for their trading partners.

Take the headache (and expense) out of testing
Trading partner testing should not be time-consuming, tedious or expensive. Streamline the process by enabling your trading partners to test directly against your companion guide edits and business requirements, online. Automated testing helps eliminate many routine tasks, freeing your staff to focus on more strategic priorities. And detailed, instantaneous feedback to your trading partners can dramatically reduce the time it takes to resolve issues, allowing a quicker transition to production.

Reduce risk of production errors through robust validation upfront
Assure that transactions you send and receive are standards compliant by verifying 100+ standard EDI specific rule types and an unlimited number of custom business rules. Use the same validation engine depended upon by thousands of companies, including some of the worlds largest, for compliance checking.

Speed adoption through effective scenario management
Improve the success rate of data flowing through your production systems by testing against a tailored set of well-defined scenarios that mirror your production processes, up front. Define unique testing criteria for different trading partners and for different file types. Then verify compliance with those conditions using automated testing tools that provide the industry’s most intuitive reports and scorecards to indicate which files passed, which failed, and why.

Achieve scalability through integrated program management
Scale your community to include new trading partners and document types by creating self-service programs for your partners to complete. Quickly setup your programs by starting from predefined task templates. Use batch update and notification wizards to simplify program enrollment, use surveys to discover readiness, and then actively manage participation and completion using automated alerts, dashboards, and detailed reporting.

Test your systems end-to-end
Testing doesn’t stop when a file has been validated against your EDI rules. You also need to test that your partner can successfully transmit files, that your translator creates the required formats for your backend-systems, and that the required responses are generated and routed back to your trading partners. Use Edifecs Ramp Management to test the entire process by using programs to define specific testing workflows that go beyond initial format and data compliance checks.

Accelerate the enablement process for a better ROI
Leverage a complete solution of technologies and best practices to reduce the time and cost for partner ramp-up by as much as 65 percent. Start exchanging electronic transactions sooner to improve the overall ROI of your complete B2B implementation. Enable more trading partners faster, without significant additional costs, thus driving more transactions and greater efficiencies. Most trading partner communities can be up in a matter of weeks, getting to ROI sooner.

Lower the cost of changes to your requirements
Ongoing change is a fact of life. Your specific business requirements as well as the base standards will continually be updated and change to meet legal or market requirements. Mitigate the costs and risks associated with this change by using our framework and related tools to deal with it in a systematic way. Take advantage of tools to help you ramp up trading partners to new transactions as they are rolled out or to migrate them to new versions, generate test data, regression test your systems, and manage the entire rollout process to your trading partner community.

Provide at-a-glance access to key ramp metrics
Manage information from one central database to realize deep visibility into all aspects of the enablement process. Centralize program materials, partner information, test records, issues, and notifications in one system. Then use predefined reports and scorecards to understand high level trends and benchmarks, as well as drill-down into fine resolution tracking details to diagnose specific problem areas.

Private Labeled Community-Centric Enablement Portal
Edifecs Ramp Management’s web-based model ensures that information is available 24 hours a day from any location. All your partners need is a web browser and an internet connection. A simple user interface and rich collaboration features help your partners get up and running quickly. Integrate your private-labeled Edifecs Ramp Management community with your corporate website by incorporating unique branding and custom URLs. Edifecs CommerceDesk Framework provides the entire infrastructure you need to deploy your application.

Testing and Scorecards
Save time by allowing partners to upload their own test data directly to Edifecs Ramp Management, without intervention by administrators. Once uploaded, data is automatically validated by Edifecs Ramp Management’s validation engine, freeing administrators to concentrate on solving partner issues. Test a wide range of standards including X12 EDIFACT, VIKS, UCS, IDOCS, XML, as well as proprietary formats. Use the included Edifecs tools to rapidly capture your own custom business edits. Empower your partners through validation reports and scorecards in easily understood business formats.

Workflow and Program Management
Create programs to help your partners achieve a specific objective, such as compliance with a guideline. When partners are enrolled in a program, they can complete tasks, download reference materials, create and respond to issues, and more. Program objectives might include migrating partners from one version of a guideline to another, or conducting partner surveys. Use Edifecs Ramp Management’s multiple task types to require your partners to complete surveys, download guidelines, upload test data for validation, and more. Use dependencies to specify that tasks cannot be started until other, and that related tasks are complete. Create branching tasks to provide an additional level of workflow inside programs.

Trading Partner Management
The trading partner management features provide for a rich, customizable repository that can accommodate a wide variety of information such as contacts, attachments, and profile information. The trading partner database supports the definition of business roles, role specific identifiers, and a wizard driven schema definition. The database can be loaded through a data import wizard, through self registration by your partners, and through an online administrator wizard.

Reporting and Dashboards
Edifecs Ramp Management provides a set of well-defined enablement focused reports, as well as rich ad hoc reporting to provide you the information you need to make better business decisions. Rapidly tailor reports to display data grouped, sorted, filtered and charted the way you need it. Select from rich data sets including partner information, issue tracking, surveys, testing, and program status. Define summary calculations such as totals and counts, and perform trending and other analysis. Reports are available in HTML, CSV and Excel format. Each report can be automatically run based on schedule or your required business rules and then automatically distributed.

Surveys
Use surveys to collect feedback from your partners. Define custom survey questions and possible answers and organize the survey into sections. Surveys can be set up so that only certain sections are displayed, based on a partner’s selection of a specific answer. When partners have completed surveys, view all results in a report, or view responses on a partner-by-partner basis.

Issues Management
Use Edifecs Ramp Management’s issue management features to enable your partners to report problems, file change requests, or ask for support. When an issue is created, it can be assigned to specific users for resolution. When progress has been made on the issue, its status can be updated.

Notifications and Alerts
Automatically send notifications to relevant users when specific events occur in Edifecs Ramp Management, such as an issue being created, or a program reaching its deadline date. Add dynamic content (such as the date, user names, program names, and more) to notification templates. Each time a notification is sent or generated, the most up-to-date information is included. Use business rules to send notifications to specific users when certain conditions are met. For example, set up a business rule to notify any partners who have not completed a program when the program deadline is approaching.

Document Repository
Store your organization’s important documents in Edifecs Ramp Management’s Reference Material repository and make them available for download by your partners. Add different types of reference material to a program, including documents, test data, guidelines, FAQs, links to web pages, and more.

Security and Privacy
Use Edifecs Ramp Management’s set of predefined roles to manage access to different areas and features. Users can be assigned different roles in different communities and programs. Edifecs Ramp Management uses 128-bit SSL encryption to protect customer data so that it cannot be intercepted and read by other people. EDI files are stored in encrypted on disk, passwords are hashed, and user access audited.

In-house or Secure On-Demand Options
Edifecs Ramp Management is available either on demand from Edifecs secure and scalable AT&T collocation facility in Seattle or for install at your location. In the on-demand environment, Edifecs Ramp Management’s servers reside behind a series of dedicated firewalls managed by Edifecs. Edifecs Ramp Management’s uptime availability is protected through a comprehensive risk-management strategy that includes scheduled automatic onsite and offsite backups, clustered hardware, redundant connectivity, and automatic failover.