AWS B2B Data Interchange FAQs

B2B Data Interchange is a fully managed service for automating the generation and transformation of electronic data interchange (EDI) documents. Customers across verticals such as healthcare, supply chain, logistics, and financial services can use B2B Data Interchange to reduce the time, complexity, and cost associated with bi-directional EDI implementations. With B2B Data Interchange, it’s easy to integrate your transactional business-to-business (B2B) data into downstream business applications and purpose-built data lakes. B2B Data Interchange’s generative AI-assisted mapping capability expedites the process of writing and testing bi-directional EDI mappings to automatically transform EDI documents to and from custom data representations.

Electronic data interchange (EDI) is the computer-to-computer exchange of business documents in a standard electronic format for purposes of interoperability and compatibility. EDI is used across a variety of industries to reliably exchange transactional data with trading partners.

B2B Data Interchange automates the transformation of business-critical EDI transactions at scale, with elasticity and pay-as-you-go pricing. The service also uses generative AI to reduce the time, complexity, and cost associated with bi-directional EDI implementations, so you can focus on gaining valuable insight from your transactional data.

B2B Data Interchange makes it easy for you to transform your electronic data interchange (EDI) documents to and from common data representations such as JSON and XML, enabling you to automate the integration of your transactional data into downstream business applications and systems. The service enables fully automated, event-driven EDI transformation by monitoring specific Amazon S3 locations for new EDI documents and transactional data. B2B Data Interchange removes the operational burdens associated with traditional EDI implementations by managing your entire EDI workflows end-to-end.

To get started with B2B Data Interchange, create a profile with contact information for your organization. Next, configure a transformer with details about the EDI transaction that will be generated or transformed. You can further customize your transformations by adding custom mapping code to the transformer’s configuration. This mapping code can be written manually or using B2B Data Interchange’s generative AI-assisted mapping capabilities. Once you’ve created a transformer, create a trading capability to specify the direction of your EDI transformation as well as where to source your data inputs and where to write your transformed data outputs. Finally, create a partnership to provide details about your trading partner as well as the contextual information required to generate outbound EDI (as needed). Once you’ve configured each of these resources, drop EDI documents or data files into the input directory specified in your trading capability. Your EDI documents or data files will be automatically transformed and written to the output directory specified in your trading capability. To learn more, visit the user guide or take the self-paced workshop.

B2B Data Interchange support all ANSI X12 EDI transaction sets for versions 4010, 4030, 4050, 4060, 5010, and 5010 HIPPA. For a full list of the X12 document numbers and versions supported, visit the user guide.

You can customize the transformation of your EDI documents by adding a mapping to your transformer resource. By adding a mapping to your transformer, it enables you to translate your EDI documents into custom data formats or generate EDI documents from custom data formats.

You can build these mappings manually or with the help of generative AI. B2B Data Interchange’s generative AI-assisted mapping capabilities reduce the effort and technical expertise required to generate mapping code, minimizing the time and cost associated with migrating your EDI workloads to AWS. To get started with building and running your event-driven EDI workflows using generative AI, visit the Getting started section of the user guide and the B2B Data Interchange Module in the self-paced workshop.

To use B2B Data Interchange’s generative AI-assisted mapping capabilities, start by enabling access to Anthropic’s Claude 3 and 3.5 Sonnet models from the Model access page within the Amazon Bedrock console. Next, upload an EDI document and JSON or XML data file to Amazon S3. Specify these samples from the B2B Data Interchange console when creating a transformer resource and select ‘Generate mapping’ from the mapping configuration page. Finally, reference the accuracy score to evaluate the mapping's quality and to determine whether additional edits are required. Once satisfied, save the mapping code so it can be used to generate and transform EDI documents in your production environment.

Yes. B2B Data Interchange automatically generates 997 and 999 functional acknowledgements as well as TA1 interchange acknowledgements in response to all inbound X12 electronic data interchange (EDI) transactions. These acknowledgements are used to confirm receipt of inbound EDI documents and to report errors. You can automatically return these acknowledgements to your trading partners using the Acknowledgment Completed events published to Amazon EventBridge along with AWS Transfer Family’s SFTP and AS2 capabilities. To learn more about automating your acknowledgement responses, reference the Configure event-driven acknowledgement section in the self-paced workshop.

Yes. You can select whether you want to generate a functional acknowledgement (997 or 999) or not and, separately, you can select if you want to generate a technical acknowledgement (TA1) or not. Moreover, for the functional acknowledgement (997 or 999) you can select whether to include an AK2 loop or not. These configurations are available at the overall partnership level and will apply to all acknowledgement documents generated for a certain trading partner. For more details on the acknowledgements generated by B2B Data Interchange, visit the user guide.

No. B2B Data Interchange validates all inbound EDI documents against the ANSI X12 EDI standard for a given transaction set and version. However, there is no way to customize validation using custom business logic.

No. Currently, B2B Data Interchange can only transform or generate X12 EDI documents to and from JSON or XML. You can use the XSLT mapping template language to convert XML data into a variety of other data formats, but there is no native way to covert X12 EDI documents to or from data formats such as CSV, IDoc, flat files, or delimited files.

No. Currently, B2B Data Interchange only supports the ANSI X12 EDI standard. Other EDI standards such as EDIFACT, used throughout Europe and Asia, and HL7v2, used within healthcare, are not supported.

Yes, you can configure starting interchange, functional group and transaction set control numbers at the partnership level. This will allow you to maintain continuity and uniqueness of control numbers you use with your trading partners as you migrate to AWS B2B Data Intrechange. For more details on control numbers generated by B2B Data Interchange, visit the user guide.

A partnership is an B2B Data Interchange resource that represents the relationship between you and your trading partner. Partnerships contain details about the individual trading partner, the types of EDI documents you exchange with them, and how those documents should be transformed.

A partnership monitors specific locations in Amazon S3 to automate the transformation of inbound EDI documents and generation of outbound EDI documents for a given trading partner. You can use a single partnership to customize the transformation and generation of multiple types of X12 EDI transactions based on your partner’s requirements and guidelines. Each partnership also surfaces detailed logs so you can monitor the transformation activities conducted with your partner.

You can use a partnership to customize the interchange (ISA) and functional group (GS) header details that are added to each outbound EDI document generated. Additionally, you can specify delimiters to be used, new line formatting configuration and whether or not you want to validate your outbound EDI documents once they’re generated.

You can use AWS Transfer Family’s fully managed SFTP and AS2 capabilities to send and receive EDI documents and acknowledgements with your trading partners. EDI documents and acknowledgements exchanged with trading partners are stored in Amazon S3 where they can be accessed for further processing, analysis, and machine learning, as well as for integration into third-party applications. Alternatively, you can use any  EDI connectivity solution to transfer EDI documents and acknowledgements to and from Amazon S3.

Once you’ve received and transformed an EDI document, you can use the Transformation Completed event published to Amazon EventBridge to trigger an ETL process or custom data integration workflow using AWS services such as AWS Glue, AWS Lambda, or AWS Step Functions. You can also use these events to automatically trigger additional post-processing prior to integrating the transformed data. To learn more about how to automatically ingrate your EDI data, take the self-paced workshop.

Once the 997 or 999 and TA1 acknowledgements have been generated, you can automatically return them to your trading partner using the Acknowledgment Completed events published to Amazon EventBridge along with AWS Transfer Family’s SFTP and AS2 capabilities. Alternatively, you can use any EDI connectivity solution so long as it can access the acknowledgments from Amazon S3. To learn more about automating your acknowledgement responses, reference the Configure event-driven acknowledgement section in the self-paced workshop.

After you’ve generated an outbound EDI document, you can automatically send it to your trading partner using the Transformation Completed event published to Amazon EventBridge along with AWS Transfer Family’s SFTP and AS2 capabilities. Alternatively, you can use any EDI connectivity solution so long as it can access the outbound EDI document from Amazon S3. To learn more about automatically sending outbound EDI documents to your trading partner, reference the SFTP Module section of the self-paced workshop.

You can monitor the transactional activities conducted with individual trading partners directly from the B2B Data Interchange console. Amazon CloudWatch logs are available in each partnership resource so you have full operational visibility into your EDI activities with each partner. Learn more about how to monitor these activities in the Testing end-to-end section of the self-paced workshop.

Yes. You can use the Transformation Failed events published to Amazon EventBridge to trigger SMS or email notifications via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). These notifications can be sent to you or your trading partners anytime an EDI document parsing fails. If the EDI document parsing succeeds but validation fails, you can return the auto-generated acknowledgement to your trading partner using AWS Transfer Family’s SFTP or AS2 capabilities.

Yes. You can track your EDI transformation activities across multiple partners by creating custom Amazon CloudWatch metrics and adding them to an Amazon CloudWatch dashboard. An Amazon CloudWatch dashboard with custom B2B Data Interchange metrics will provide you with an overview of all your EDI transformation activities across your entire network of trading partners. You can also share Amazon CloudWatch dashboards with internal and external partners. To learn how to create a custom Amazon CloudWatch dashboard, take the self-paced workshop.

Your EDI documents, acknowledgements, and data files are stored in Amazon S3 where they can be accessed for further processing, analysis, and machine learning, as well as for integration into third-party applications. All Amazon S3 resources, including buckets, prefixes, and individual objects, are private and encrypted by default. These resources are only accessible to the AWS account owner and users authorized by the AWS account owner.

B2B Data Interchange provides built-in security features to keep your data secure and compliant by default. You can also use other AWS services to ensure your data remains protected at all times. When storing data in AWS, you can use Amazon S3’s various data encryption options to ensure your data is protected at rest. When exchanging data with external trading partners, you use AWS Transfer Family’s SFTP and AS2 capabilities to ensure your data is protected in transit. You can also use services like Amazon GuardDuty to malware scan all inbound EDI documents as they’re received and written into Amazon S3.

Yes. B2B Data Interchange is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) eligible. As a healthcare customer, you can build and run your bi-directional, event-driven EDI workloads on B2B Data Interchange while maintaining HIPAA compliance. Currently, the service does not support other compliance programs such as PCI-DSS, GDPR, FedRAMP, or SOC 1/2/3. To learn more about building and running your HIPAA compliant EDI workloads on B2B Data Interchange, visit the Compliance validation section of the user guide.

No. Neither B2B Data Interchange nor Amazon Bedrock store or train on any EDI documents, data samples, or mapping code. Additionally, Anthropic’s Claude 3 and 3.5 Sonnet models are not updated, influenced, or trained using any of your data. To learn more about how Amazon Bedrock manages your data, visit the Data protection section of Amazon Bedrock’s user guide.

With B2B Data Interchange, there are no resources to manage and no upfront costs. You pay only for the number of active partnerships maintained and number of transformation steps used, in addition to charges for storing your transformed data in Amazon S3. For more information, visit the B2B Data Interchange pricing page.

You incur changes directly from Amazon Bedrock each time you choose to generate mapping code with B2B Data Interchange’s generative AI-assisted mapping capabilities. However, you only incur charges when generating mapping code during the transformer resource configuration – there are no additional Amazon Bedrock charges incurred at EDI transformation run-time. When generating mapping code, you do not incur additional charges from B2B Data Interchange as the service invokes Amazon Bedrock foundation models enabled in your AWS account. For more information, visit the Amazon Bedrock pricing page.