2. Set up a Trading Partnership as a Follower

A Trading Partnership is a relation between two EDI Accounts that contains at least one Relationship. If you are a Follower who wants to trade EDI documents with a Leader, you must create a new Trading Partnership by sending a Trade Request to your Leader.

To create a new Trading Partnership as a Follower, you will need to:

Accept or create a Trade Request.
(Only for Unclaimed Leaders) Gather your Trading Partner's requirements.
Configure your Relationship

2.1 Accept or Create a Trade Request

First you will need to start a new Partnership by accepting an existing Trade Request or sending a new one.

To accept an existing Trade Request:

Go to your Trade Requests settings.
Click on an entry under "Inbound Requests". This will open a sidebar on the right with further information about the Trade Request.
Click Accept.

To create a new Trade Request, you will first need the following information from your Partner:

ISA ID
ISA Qualifier
Contact email

Orderful will use the ISA ID to look up whether we already have this company and its requirements in our system.

Once you have these you can create the Trade Request:

Go to your Trade Requests settings.
Click on Create Trade Request.
Fill out the form that pops up. Since you are the Follower, be sure to select "My trading partner (I am the Follower).
Once completed, you will be returned to the Trade Requests page where you will see your new request under "Outbound Requests" with a status of either “Pending” (if your Leader is already in Orderful) or “Pending Requirements” (if your Leader is not already in Orderful). If the status is “Pending” you can wait for your Leader to respond to your Trade Request, and then skip to Configure your Relationship.

Clicking on the new Trade Request will bring up an information pane on the right. On this pane you will find a link Go to onboarding form which you can follow to enter your Leader’s requirements. You will also receive an email from Orderful that will contain a link to this form. If you know your Leader's requirements, you can enter them here. Otherwise, you will have to gather their requirements.

2.2 Gather requirements

If you are a Follower sending a Trade Request to an Unclaimed Leader, you will need to gather their document trading requirements. You can gather these requirements from your Leader in any way you like. For convenience, we will send you both an email template that you can fill out and send to your Leader as well as a form to enter their requirements:

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If you received a Trade Request from a claimed Leader who is already in our system, you can skip this step.

Once the information is submitted, the Orderful team will review your Trade Request and either:

Get in touch for follow-up if there are requirements that are missing, incomplete or inaccurate.
Accept your trade request and configure the relationships on your Trading Partner’s side. You are now ready to start configuring and testing your relationships.

Once the request is accepted its validation status will be updated to "Accepted", however it will only be visible if you check "Show hidden" on the upper right of the Trade Requests page.

2.3 Configure your Relationship

Now that your Trade Request has been accepted, you will have one or more new Relationships visible in your Relationship settings.

You will have one Relationship for each Transaction Type that your Leader has defined in their scenarios.

Until the required information is submitted, the status of the Relationship will remain as "Pending setup by partner".

Once Orderful has configured your Partner’s end of the Relationship, the status will change to "Configure setup". You will receive an email when this happens. At this point you can select the Relationship and configure the following:

Data format: The data format of the document you will send or receive.
Version: (e.g. 4010).
Guideline
Communication Channel: (Inbound only) Choose a Communication Channel for transactions you receive in the Live and Test stream.
- If you want to receive transactions in both Test and Live streams on the same Communication Channel, you can tick the checkbox "Use selected for Test Communication Channel".
Receive functional acknowledgements (Outbound only) If the Data Format is X12, you can select this checkbox to receive 997 Functional Acknowledgements.
- If you choose to receive Functional Acknowledgments, you must then choose a Live Communication Channel for acknowledgments received for transactions in the Live and Test stream.
- If you want to receive Functional Acknowledgments for transactions in both Test and Live streams on the same Communication Channel, you can tick the checkbox "Use selected for Test Communication Channel".
Timeout Time: (Outbound only) Defines how long you want to wait for a Functional Acknowledgment from your partner before a transaction is set as "Overdue".