Written by Callum Wright, Junior Infor Consultant
If the below looks complex then you’re probably right. It’s part of a map that’s responsible for importing an order file into M3. There are a massive amount of variants, each referring to different years and specifications and it’s essentially the building blocks for EDI integration.
Thankfully over the years, Infor have built up a lot of these maps as standard, and depending on your agreement you can ask “can you provide me with the D96A Edifact Order map” and a lot of the hard work will be done for you.
However, regardless of if you use an EDI broker, there’ll come a time where the logic will need to be tweaked.
- Your customer code might not match the customer’s customer code.
- You want to send ASNs on a pallet level, not just the line level.
- Your map is no longer working and you don’t know why.
- You want to streamline your EDI processes.
Scenario 1
“M3 is not deriving the correct customer code from the order file”
It turned out there was a lot of hard coding in place (avoid where possible), e.g. if external customer ID = “0000000000012”, convert it to “customer 1”. It’s too technical for an M3 user to maintain as it’s written in Java. Instead, the map should lookup to data tables in M3 that the user can maintain easily. It’s more work for the developer but it makes the end-users life easier.
Scenario 2
“I’ve updated my conversion tables in M3 (CRS881) and it’s not reflecting in my MEC map.”
It’s likely the map is using a technique called DataTranslator. It’s great, but changes in M3 are not instantly reflective. Instead, the map can be converted to utilise APIs (CRS881MI.GetTranslData) to retrieve up-to-date data.
Scenario 3
“I need to send my ASNs in a different format”.
A new map was created to send the ASNs in a format shown on the right-hand side, the old format’s on the left. The old map was used as a basis and was heavily modified to get the pallet information per line.
Ready to learn more?
Anthesis consultant Callum Wright runs an in-depth 2 day training course that can be performed remotely. We start from the ground up, covering everything from getting started, to developing and rolling out your own MEC maps in a production environment (this applies to on-premise and cloud-suite versions of M3).
Author Callum Wright is a Junior Infor Consultant at Anthesis working with major M3 customers to help them use their system effectively to achieve success.
Speak to us today to book your training course, call 01260 296350 or email info@anthesis.co.uk.
