Tangentia - EDI Activities

Easily integrate EDI invoices into a RPA enabled Accounts Payable (AP) process increasing accuracy and scalability.

Tangentia Automation consultants were speaking to a large customer in India who were implementing UiPath for their Accounts Payable process and they were receiving invoices from their vendors in multiple formats and their accuracy was only around 60%. 

Tangentia has a separate business unit called Tangentia EDI that manages EDI for 1000+ companies worldwide. At a water cooler, a Tangentia Automation consultant ran into a Tangentia EDI consultant and they spoke about how they would each approach an Accounts Payable process automation and then we had our eureka moment - why not create an EDI activity from UiPath and that is how we got started on this.

The business case: many companies and many of their vendors already have some EDI infrastructure in place to exchange structured business documents and if we bring those documents within RPA enabled process, we could definitely increase our accuracy within the process as a whole, as well as make the processes easily scalable.

The EDI package within UiPath takes credentials and dates from the user and returns a List of invoices with its details. Within the EDI package, the following are the 2 major components:

• Communication: The EDI activity makes a secure connection with the Tangentia Gateway Cloud EDI Portal and then calls a REST API to fetch EDI information. Currently, it calls Tangentia Gateway, but it can integrate with other EDI applications as well. Additionally, it has been tested with IBM Sterling B2B Integrator.
• Data Transformation: Converts Raw ANSI-X12 EDI to JSON and makes it available to the UiPath data model.

Most companies have an Accounts Payable (AP) process running, wherein they receive multiple invoices from their vendors in various different formats but, their accuracy levels are still far from 100%. These companies already have some EDI Infrastructure in place to exchange structured business documents and if we bring those documents within RPA enabled process, our EDI package would help these companies to increase their accuracy significantly, as well as make the processes easily scalable.