Global Industries

SpecBuilder is an integrated and intuitive design-time tool for business and EDI analysts that simplifies, reduces errors in and accelerates the design phase of Electronic Data Interchange. Edifecs SpecBuilder allows easy creation, testing and troubleshooting of guidelines, publishing of guidelines to suppliers and partners, mapping guidelines between multiple standards and formats, and migration of guidelines between different versions of standards. SpecBuilder provides over 30,000 pre-built templates to enable quick development and implementation of guidelines through customization of the out-of-the-box templates.

In many ways, electronic communication between two computer systems is similar to human communication. In both cases, the content exchanged between the two parties must adhere to specific sets of rules and structures. In case of English and other languages the grammar defines how to use verbs, nouns, articles, and so forth. In the case of electronic communication rules are defined by various standards bodies such as X12, UN/EDIFACT, and others for various vertical industries.

The benefits of engaging in electronic data communication are clear and well-proven. The cost savings realized by automating manual tasks and reducing errors by avoiding re-keying are just some of the initial benefits for organizations. As two parties further engage in the electronic exchange of data, opportunities to improve business processes, such as reducing inventory through just-in-time processes or accelerating the revenue cycles through electronic funds transfer can have a significant positive impact for both parties.

To achieve these benefits, there are challenges along the way which must be overcome. One of the main reasons for failure stems from the fact that in human communication, we are able to make appropriate guesses and assumptions in areas where information is missing or incorrect, for example, where the grammar is not strictly followed. With electronic data communication, most computer systems are not able to perform this function, which humans are able to do, naturally. This simple fact leads to many challenges and sometimes outright project failure when attempting to move from manual to Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI.

• When parties are getting ready to engage with EDI, each party must configure their computer systems. This initial configuration will be done by multiple business and technical IT team members in each organization. Therefore all team members must understand what they need to do in a very precise and easy-to-understand manner.
• Any changes during implementation must be shared on a continual basis with the team in a timely and consistent manner.
• Testing individual components can go a long way to ensure the success of the project. However, testing specific steps in the process is often not possible or is a complicated manual and expensive task.
• Successful implementation also requires testing data representing various business cases or scenarios, and creating these test data files is a time-consuming and manual process.
• Over time, business requirements will change and new versions of standards will be released. Whether changing the system to meet new business needs or keeping up with new standards migration is a required step in the process, adding unforeseen costs to the project.
• Businesses growth prompts adoption of additional standards. As with languages, doing business overseas requires working in different languages such as Spanish or French. Similarly EDI requires supporting multiple standard types. Learning new standards from scratch means a costly education and learning curve for staff members.
• While B2B solutions such as those offered by IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun and TIBCO provide good solutions for production exchange of data, they do not provide solutions for solving one of the key problems stated above — that business and technical analysts from all parties must agree upon one specification. In other words, getting to production is costly, especially when thousands of trading partners must be ramped up.

Edifecs, the leading provider of B2B solutions for transaction-based interoperability, addresses all of these challenges with one product tool set — SpecBuilder.

With Edifecs SpecBuilder, you are essentially giving your B2B projects a running start in all phases of EDI implementation. For starters, Edifecs SpecBuilder comes with over 18,000 transaction templates, so instead of creating them from scratch you can modify and annotate them to meet your business needs. This plus other time saving features have made Edifecs SpecBuilder the tool of choice for over one thousand corporations, consultants, industry associations and standards bodies. Over 20% of the Fortune 500 use SpecBuilder today.

Available standalone or as an integrated component in the Edifecs Healthcare Suite, with Edifecs SpecBuilder you can:

• Accelerate your B2B companion/implementation guide development by leveraging an easy-to-use authoring tool that incorporates best practices from a cross section of industries such as healthcare, retail and transportation.
• Easily publish in different formats, such as HTML or PDF so that both internal team members and your external trading partners work from the same document.
• Leverage pre-built integration with other third party products to reduce redundant work. With extensive import and export capabilities, the specifications from SpecBuilder can easily be exported to other third party tools such as translators.
• Keep up with business requirement changes and version changes in a standard by using a powerful difference comparison tool and a migration tool to carry forward the work that has already been done.
• Improved testing scope and depth on each step of the process through automated test data generation and desktop transaction testing and data validation.

Standardize your B2B requirements process by using one tool for the widest available selection of electronic standards including X12, UN/EDIFACT, HIPAA, HL7, W3C XML Schema (XSD), NCPDP, flat

With SpecBuilder’s single, comprehensive and intuitive user interface, one can either create a specification from scratch or create one by modifying or annotating one of the 18,000 message templates provided with the product out of the box. In either case, the user is provided up to 10 free-form user notes so that they can capture all the requirements in one place and in the context of the message structure definition. SpecBuilder includes support for custom business rules, so all rules related to the message content can be stored in one easily accessible and distributed document.

Once the specification authoring step is completed the content is maintained in a machine accessible structured format allowing it to be used to solve many different problems, including publishing. Publishing the message specification is a key step in ensuring a smooth EDI project implementation. Through publishing, all parties — internal business, technical, QA and external business, technical and QA analysts — can all be on the same page. Whether the data exchange is with one large trading partner or with thousands of supplier trading partners, publishing allows everyone to know what is the agreed upon message that is to be exchanged and what is expected of each party.

With the specification in a machine-readable format, data files can now be validated against the specification in SpecBuilder. Using SpecBuilder, you may now test immediately after the specification authoring is completed. It is no longer necessary to wait until the production system comes on line to test whether or not your specification is correct, or whether the data itself is correct. This is useful for many purposes:

• You can immediately verify if the specification structure and rules are correct by testing data files and determining if there are any inconsistencies in the specification. They can then be corrected in the same user interface before final publication of the specification. This avoids costly problems which are often not discovered until the end of the project.
• You can use data validation to test data files sent to you by your trading partners, so even if your system is not completely ready for processing files, you can give intelligent feedback to your trading partners.
• Alternatively, if you are sending data files and your trading partner is not ready to receive them, you can test them against the specification and make the necessary corrections. This way SpecBuilder provides a check-and-balance mechanism to your production system as an independent system to verify that data is fully compliant with the specification.

Complete system testing for a B2B system is complex and time consuming. With the specification in a structured machine readable format, SpecBuilder can help automate creation of various test data files to represent real-life business scenarios. The test scenarios can be for a unit test, such as a single transaction in which the data is set to a future date to see how your B2B system and back-end system respond. Or generate very large test data files or many small real-time data files to stress test your B2B and back-end system.

“Create once, leverage many-times” is at the core of SpecBuilder. In keeping with this principle, SpecBuilder comes with many import/export routines. The export routines allow the specification from SpecBuilder to be exported to other third party products such as translators. This allows re-use of the work done in SpecBuilder directly for use with these products.

Today, change is the only constant in business. As business processes are further optimized and new versions of standards are released, existing EDI implementations will need to be changed to reflect the changing business environments. With the SpecBuilder toolset, keeping up with these changes can be done in a timely and cost-effective manner. By leveraging the structured specification in SpecBuilder, two specifications can easily be compared for gap-analysis and changes can be migrated automatically or manually from one version to another, for complete control.