Using Lawson EDI with GHX

Hi Saurabh -

Lawson works pretty nicely with GHX - it was a little rough several years ago in 8.x, but on LSF9+ it is pretty smooth. The Lawson EDI product can be configured to transmit directly via FTP and GHX handles everything else from their Connect Plus Server...just basically setup ED501/ED502 and ED02 + the normal ED10, ED40 stuff.

GHX has a very nice web portal that validates contract pricing via EDI and is updated daily from the suppliers on the Exchange - so your buyers can manage the price exceptions from the Purchase Order Acknowledgement and catch price discrepancies BEFORE they get into the Lawson Invoice Matching applications. Enable 832 processing to bring contract pricing into Lawson for use in PO25 using PO560 and PO536. Enable 855 processing and bring it in using PO122.

GHX also has a Metatrade 850 product that replaces the need for Lawson Fax Integrator (which is a real pain). A Metatrade GHX vendor is setup like a normal EDI vendor in Lawson, yet GHX takes the Lawson 850 EDI data and sends it via Fax or Email to the Supplier. So, this is just less stuff you have to manage from the Lawson system side for Faxes and small-time vendors who do not support EDI.

There are also some really elegant Business Process Design possibilities using the Lawson Process Flow Integrator tool with EDI and GHX - normally jobdef is setup to schedule the EDI Jobs - ED501/ED502/PO120/MA540/MA531 etc. These can be kicked off using a Process Flow too - so adding some control to the process for non-technical people (ie: delegating that routine work to the business user :-). PFI is really nice for allowing the Business Process Owners control over handling transaction exceptions....I've developed and built a number of these over the years. I've also done multiple Lawson EDI installations and configurations over the years with GHX - so let me know if you have more questions :-).

Hope that helps you out...didn't mean to get carried away here :-).

Rob

Hi Rob,
Many thanks for the detailed update. Just the kind of information I was looking to get. This gives us some confidence that it is a module which works well. Our only complication (am hoping its not) is that we are based in UK and GHX UK and we would be the first customer in UK to be interacting with them. However saying that as GHX US have got a good relationship they should be able to talk to each other for nay queries.

For our Non EDI vendors we will probably carry on using Version One to email/fax the formatted documents.

Its interesting what you say about the use of process flow and I think we would definitely need to look more into that.

Thanks
Saurabh