Orderful terms

Trading Partner

A Trading Partner is an entity that exchanges EDI data with another entity. Put simply, if a company is sending EDI data to another company, both of them are Trading Partners.

Follower VS Leader

A Trading Partner that defines EDI Guidelines is known as a “Leader” within Orderful. A Trading Partner that follows EDI Guidelines is known as a “Follower”. This label is always relative, which means that a company can be a Follower relative to one Trading Partner and a Leader relative to another.

Organization

An “Organization” is a section of Orderful that contains all the data pertaining to one or more EDI Accounts. Most organizations only have one EDI Account.

EDI Account

An EDI Account in Orderful represents an EDI Trading Partner. Your company and every entity that you want to trade EDI data with will need to be represented by an EDI Account in Orderful. Every EDI Account is represented by a unique ISA ID and ISA ID Qualifier.

Relationship

A Relationship is a directional EDI data connection between two EDI Accounts in Orderful. Each Relationship is either “inbound” or “outbound” and is for a particular Transaction Type (for example an 850 Purchase Order).

Trade Request

A Trade Request is a request to create one or more new Relationships between one of your EDI Accounts and another EDI Account. If you are the Leader in a Trade Request, you must specify one or more Scenarios to include in your Trade Request.

Scenario

Scenarios are business process tests created by Leaders for their Followers. Each Scenario defines a set of step-by-step transactions that must be sent by the Leader and/or Follower. A Scenario should correspond to a real-world business process. If it has more than one step, it must correspond to an existing Workflow that Orderful supports.

Scenario Testing

Scenario Testing is used to guide partners through the steps of a defined Scenario. Scenario Tests are defined by Leaders, with steps that must be completed before the Relationship can transition to the "Go-live ready" status.

Transaction

Every EDI document that is traded in a Relationship is a “transaction”. An example of a transaction would be an 850 Purchase Order sent from you to a Trading Partner as part of an outbound Relationship.

Guideline

In Orderful, a Guideline defines the information that a transaction should contain. Guidelines are applied as requirements for Relationships. Like Relationships, Guidelines are directional, either Inbound or Outbound. Each Guideline is owned by a particular EDI Account. A Follower cannot send a transaction to a Leader if it doesn’t meet the Leader’s Guideline for that Relationship. By contrast, a Leader is able to send a transaction to a follower even if it doesn’t meet the Follower’s Guideline.

Communication Channel

The Communication Channel is the connection between Orderful and a Trading Partner’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or System of Record (SOR). There are Inbound Communication Channels that bring in data from your Trading Partners to your internal systems, and Outbound Communication Channels that transmit data from you to your Trading Partners. Examples of supported protocols include AS2, SFTP, and HTTP Polling.

Rule

A Rule is an instruction that modifies EDI data as it passes through the Orderful platform. A Rule can be applied to an element, segment, or entire loop within a transaction. For example, you could have a Rule that specifies that every time an inbound transaction contains a countryCode with value USA it is changed to US.

Integration Assistance

Integration Assistance is a tool that helps you integrate your SOR with Orderful. It does this by generating example payloads based on the requirements for any of your relationships. Alongside the example payload, the Leader’s guidelines for each property within that payload are shown.