Building a resilient supply chain has become a top priority for organizations due to disruptions we have seen over the past few years, like COVID-19 and Ukraine-Russia conflict.
B2B integration platforms play a vital role in helping organizations achieve supply chain diversification and expansion. Faster onboarding of new business partners and rich operational management capabilities are two important aspects that customers need to build a resilient supply chain.
MuleSoft’s Anypoint Partner Manager is a low-code, next generation B2B integration platform. It enables organizations to integrate their composable, enterprise application network with their external business partners via traditional EDI methods, and also via modern API and non-EDI channels. Anypoint Partner Manager and the broader platform offers rich features that help customers achieve true end-to-end traceability.
What’s new for Anypoint Partner Manager
We’re happy to announce that Anypoint Partner Manager’s July 2023 release introduces the following key innovations that help organizations achieve faster partner onboarding and superior operational management of business transactions.
- Transaction replay
- Support for CSV and delimited files
- X12 and EDIFACT interoperability enhancements
Transaction replay
As organizations trade with multiple partners to exchange time-sensitive business transactions, it is important for operational users to have self-service tooling to reprocess business documents when required. B2B transaction processing is almost always a multi-step process involving the interaction with business partners on one side, and with disparate backend systems on the other side, with the B2B integration platforms acting as a critical gateway.
Users can now replay transmission payloads with a simple click of a button in the UI, or automate triggering replay actions through platform API calls. As the transmissions are replayed, users can view the replay history on the original transmission detail record, and also view the replayed transmission instances through easy search and navigation experiences. Platform administrators can also view the history of all user actions, including replays from the Audit logs under Access Management — essentially a complete, end-to-end experience in managing an enterprise’s transaction replay needs.
CSV/delimited files
Expanding the business partner ecosystem across multiple geographies requires organizations to be open to exchanging business transactions in formats that their partners can support. While the two global EDI standards, X12 and EDIFACT, are widely used by most organizations, there are enterprises that have different preferences and capabilities of what format they can support. Anypoint Partner Manager has been supporting XML and JSON formats besides X12 and EDIFACT for quite some time.
With the introduction of support for CSV/delimited files, customers now have more options to onboard their business partners faster, with a simplified and configuration-driven low-code experience, through a wide variety of data formats and protocols.
X12 and EDIFACT interoperability enhancements
In addition to transaction replay and support for CSV/delimited files, this release also includes the following enhancements that improve the overall interoperability of Anypoint Partner Manager, enabling customers to integrate with their external business partner ecosystem with confidence.
The first is improved acknowledgment reconciliation to handle partial acceptance and rejection with error scenarios.
The second is the ability to configure Hex codes as X12 and EDIFACT delimiter characters to generate EDI payloads, matching the specifications of business partners.
Conclusion
With the introduction of the new features in the July 2023 release, Anypoint Partner Manager now offers more options for enterprises to integrate their composable enterprise application network with their external business partner ecosystem.
Check out this video to learn more about Anypoint Partner Manager’s new features and more.
Resources
- Product spotlight: Demo
- Product documentation: Transaction replay
- Product documentation: Configure CSV message types
About the author
Vijayan Ganapathy is a Director of Product Management at MuleSoft, where he leads their B2B Integration product portfolio. During his career, he has helped organizations design and build large scale B2B/EDI integration solutions using various integration platforms. With years of supply chain and logistics domain expertise, Vijayan leads the strategy and execution of Anypoint Partner Manager and other products in the B2B integration space. In his free time, Vijayan enjoys spending time with his two kids and exploring the outdoors. Follow Vijayan on LinkedIn.