EDI Testing-Here's what you need to know

EDI compliance is required by retailers from their respective suppliers. It's a way to make sure that the relationship elements are economically viable. Predictability, Accuracy, timeliness etc., are some of the key factors that need to be taken into consideration.

Majority of the retailers consider EDI testing as an important business activity. If a new product is being launched or if there is a new trading partner then EDI testing can be used tactically. In this article, you will get a brief idea about EDI testing.

What is EDI testing?

It is a specific testing process wherein EDI document flow is checked end-to-end between internal systems and organizations to make sure that the data is exchanged smoothly before the actual EDI implementation.

It's a practice that is followed, encouraged and mandated by most of the trading partners to check whether the suppliers have the essential hardware and software to receive, send and translate standardized business documents.

The retail partner is interested in knowing whether the products that have been ordered have arrived on time at the right location and as per the expected requests.

They want to make sure that it is an error-free and seamless process. General document testing and GS1-128 label testing are the two primary types of EDI testing.

The significance of EDI Certification:

To support and add new EDI-capable trading partners would be considered quite difficult if a specific process for EDI certification is not followed.

EDI certification validates that you comply with trading partners' informational and technical requirements and ensure that EDI transactions will flow in a streamlined manner.

Trading partners can meet industry compliance and consumer privacy requirements through the strategic use of EDI Certification.

Successful EDI testing will eventually lead to EDI Certification:

Organizations encourage their trading partners to communicate using EDI software. There is a detailed EDI certification process that helps in sending and receiving EDI transactions according to the specifications.

EDI testing scenarios:

Before the testing process is initiated, the team must be able to demonstrate whether they can exchange data between your EDI software platforms by seeing that the EDI transactions are mapped accordingly. The data structures are translated by EDI mapping from a proprietary file to a standard EDI format.

Once the mapping process has been completed, various EDI testing needs to be performed to achieve EDI certification. Following are a few types of testing that can be considered:

1. Integrity testing: The syntactical integrity of the EDI transaction is confirmed by testing elemental attributes, segment order, valid segments etc.

2. Requirements testing: The transactions are made sure that they adhere to your partner's EDI mapping requirements, implementation guide and specific EDI standards related to B2B gateway or HIPPA requirements.

3. Balanced testing: This testing method confirms your summary level data, financial values and field totals are balanced.

4. Situation testing: In this method, specific inter-segment situations are tested in which if A happens then B must be populated. Situational fields are validated based on situations or values found elsewhere in the file.

5. External code set testing: Implementing guide-specific code sets (and other HIPAA-compliant code sets) are validated, thereby making sure that for each given transaction, their usage is appropriate.

6. Line of service testing: It ensures that any line of service or any data records specific to the product type are correctly processed and created.

When the required EDI testing scenarios are completed as per the expected requirements, it becomes crucial to perform end-to-end testing to check that partner transactions can be processed through your backend systems.

Conclusion: If you are looking for strategic advice on the efficacy of EDI testing and its various types that might be of benefit for your projects, then do get connected with a software testing services company who will guide you with some key tactics that work from a software testing viewpoint.

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.