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Over the past 18 months, Stedi launched eight key building blocks for developing EDI systems.

We designed these developer-focused products to address the major flaws in existing EDI solutions: a lack of control, extensibility, or both. While our building blocks solved these problems, stitching them together into an end-to-end EDI integration still required substantial development effort—until today.

There are many different ways to provision AWS services, and we use several of them to address different use cases at Stedi. We set out to benchmark the performance of each option – direct APIs, Cloud Control, CloudFormation, and Service Catalog.

EDI is more prevalent in healthcare than in any other industry, yet EDI specifications for healthcare are some of the most challenging and opaque standards to understand.

The format, commonly known as X12 HIPAA, is captured in a series of PDFs that are up to 700 pages long. These PDFs aren't available to the general public and they don't provide machine-readable schemas for parsing, generating, or validating files. These challenges have made working directly with X12 HIPAA transactions out of reach for all but the largest companies - until now.

At Stedi, we have always prioritized the security and privacy of our customers and their data. That is why we are thrilled to announce that Stedi has received SOC 2 Type II compliance certification and our products have been certified as HIPAA eligible by an external audit.

Every EDI relationship begins with an implementation guide. These EDI implementation guides have been shared in the same format for decades – they’re typically PDFs with dozens or hundreds of pages of details to sift through, and a successful EDI implementation requires getting the details just right.

I don’t blame EDI for failures in logistics any more than I blame kittens for messing up my floor. I only got Sam and Toby a day ago, but they’re the cutest balls of fuzz ever to grow legs and they jumped straight into my heart. Still, as I’m staring at the puddle on my floor, I’m convinced that there's a design flaw in their digestive system. I don’t remember their breakfast being this chunky, or this sticky. Sputter gunk kittens are a new experience for me, so I call a friend and she recommends a steam cleaner.

The concept behind control numbers is pretty straightforward, but to work with them in practice, there are a lot of details you need to understand. For example, an interchange control number is a unique identifier for an interchange and you can use it to acknowledge that you received an interchange. In practice, it’s only unique within a certain scope, trading partners may have their own expectations about them regardless of the standard, and it’s uncommon to use them in acknowledgments. And all of that is assuming that you know what an interchange is.

At Stedi, we are fans of everything related to AWS and serverless. By standing on the shoulders of giants, the engineering teams can quickly iterate on their ideas by not having to reinvent the wheel. Serverless-first development allows product backends to scale elastically with low maintenance effort and costs.

The trick to dealing with date and time in an X12 EDI document is to make things easy for yourself. EDI isn’t going to do that for you. EDI makes it possible to put a date on a business document in any way a human being has ever come up with and that flexibility comes at a cost: it’s downright confusing. You don’t have to deal with that confusion, though, because you don’t have to deal with that flexibility. It all starts with the implementation guide that you received from your trading partner.

When a question about JSONata turns up on StackOverflow, we do our best to answer it. Not because it's part of our strategy, or because we are building our corporate image, but because we like to help out. And we like to impress a little bit, too.

Business integrations are anything but straightforward – they are typically composed of many steps that need to be executed sequentially to process a single business transaction.

EDI – Electronic Data Interchange – is an umbrella term for many different “standardized” frameworks for exchanging business-to-business transactions. It dates back to the 1960s and remains a pain point in every commercial industry from supply chain and logistics to healthcare and finance. What makes it so hard? Why is it still an unsolved problem despite many decades of immense usage?