What's the difference between traditional EDI integrations and DX2?

Traditional EDI

EDI----------------------AS2----------------------AS4

Digital Doc Exchange with DX2

EDI ---------------------------DX2 -------------------- API​

Information transmitted in minutes
(FTP and batches – staged)​

Information transmitted in seconds
(document oriented – automatic)​.
Don't have to pick up in batches. 

Limited to data included in the EDI standard​. 

Can more easily handle facilitation of more data in the form of extensions and packages​. 

Computer to computer exchange
of business documents in standard electronic format via FTP or AS2​

A standard protocol that allows computing systems to interact with one another (via the cloud or via API) and document format does not matter anymore (sender vs receiver)​

Traditional EDI is point to point​

DX2 is canonical hub and spoke​. 

Elite​ -
It is only the people that have the technical capability to do EDI that the organisation can trade with. Limited ability to deal with medium and small businesses. 

Democratic​ -
Gives the technical capability to businesses of all levels to integrate, with multiple entry points (EDI, OCR, manual entry). 

A communication technology used to transmit data
from one system to another. 
It’s just a tool.​

It’s business protocol;
APIs are a messaging format that allows data to be transmitted from one system to another in nanoseconds​

Launch and hope​ (like Post or snail mail)

Digital courier​ - ability to track where document is in the process and the status including why it has errored. 

Partner oriented (1-to-1), limited reuse​

Application and user oriented – promotes reuse​

Industry standards​ based - developed because of the lack of ability to customise the framework.  Now difficult to interact between industries. 

Technical standards based​ - based on protocols to use APIs.
Data is almost incidental. 

Business Application Friendly –
accessibility behind the wall.​

Mobile device friendly –
liberal accessibility​

Medium length deployment​

Fast deployment​

Standard Message formats (order, invoices, shipment notices). Driven mainly by industry bodies​.

Standard formats plus custom message formats using UBL core components but also covers EDI formats​.

System of record​

System of engagement​

Partner onboarding requires technical and business workflow​

Partner onboarding typically simpler​

Services well defined and do not evolve regularly​

Services are defined via APIs. They require fully-fledged lifecycle management. API allow for variation of use cases that are not predefined.​

Business agreements are often required​

Usage conditions defined unilaterally​

SLAs are commonplace​

SLAs not a top of mind issue​

Typically used for order-to-cash, and similar supply chain cycles, as well as multi-chain interoperability​

Typically used for data and service exposure​

Value in efficiency in partner relations​

Value is in both partner relationships
as well as service monetization​

Owned by supply chain and IT departments​

Owned by users​

Parties agree on format​

Canonical model, centralised mapping as a service​