Name: From firefighting to control: Rethinking EDI for Microsoft Dynamics 365
Uploaded: 2025-10-07T18:01:09.567Z
Duration: 42 min 24 s
Description: From firefighting to control: Rethinking EDI for Microsoft Dynamics 365

Transcript for "From firefighting to control: Rethinking EDI for Microsoft Dynamics 365": Hello, everyone. Welcome to our webinar. Okay. Let's get started here. My name is Ebru Salaam, director of product marketing at Celigo. And, today, we'll discuss about rethinking ETI for, Microsoft Dynamics three sixty five, ERP systems like, Business Central and supply chain and operations. And, I have three speakers joining me. So they are, in the trenches of PBI across companies like, Call One, Groove Life, and Cap2Coat. And we'll, discuss about why it's, important to pick the right EBI solution for your business, what's available through the, through Microsoft native, solution, What are the popular third party EDI options out there? So we'll, talk about the strength, the shortcomings of these, solutions, and then we'll introduce a new approach to EDI and talk a bit about our, Celigo products, b two b manager. And, also, we have, speakers from Callworm and Google Life here. So they'll talk about their real life EDI, journeys so that we can, take this conversation, you know, beyond, just, being presented in slides. And, so some housekeeping items. So if you have questions, during the session, there's a a q and a window. You can type them there. And at the end of the session, we will have dedicated time, to answer your, questions. So now, yes. That being said, so, let's introduce, today's speakers. And if you could join me on stage here. So let's follow the order, on the slide with introductions. With let's start with Justin. So if you could introduce yourself, talk about your company and your role, that would be awesome. Yeah. My name is Justin Carter. I'm VP of Technology at CaptiCode. We are a implementer of Dynamics three sixty five and Power Platform Solutions. I've been in the space, about eighteen years. I've been a Microsoft MVP for eleven, specifically in, the Dynamics biz app space. Yeah. And our company is based out of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and and we're implementers. So a lot of experience with integrations. Awesome. Blake, would you like to come continue? Yeah. My name is Blake Galloway. I'm an inventory planning manager here at Groove Life, and we are an outdoor accessory brand specializing in silicone rings, watch bands, wallets, and belts. And we are located just South of Nashville, Tennessee. Mara? Hi. And my name is Mara. I work with Call One. I'm a developer, and I also lead their technical department. And at Call One, we do everything between, like, individual headsets to entire AV solutions for, office spaces or, anything in between, like, a work from home or an office setting. Awesome. So thank you all for joining us today. So really excited, to have you, on this, Elan. So, Meryl and Blake, feel free to leave the stage for now, and I'll invite you back later. Okay. So let me, get started by giving first some, background on, Celigo in case you haven't heard about us before. So Celigo is an iPaaS integration platform, as a service, and, we are very popular among brands, retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and distributors. So you can see some, of our customers here. So we have, like, a lot of well known, brands and retailers use us. And they use, Celigo to, intelligently automate their b two b and b two c commerce, business processes within their, organizations and also with their partners. So anything from, you know, b to b EDI, order to cash, quote to cash, to three p r management, can be automated on our, platform. And, just to give you an act an idea about the, scale of our platform, so more than 40,000,000,000 records are processed, every month, on the platform, and there are more than, 250,000, live, flows, running on it in this moment as I, spit. So, having said that, we have a a mini poll right now. So, how familiar are you with EDI? Just, you know, pick the option, that works for you. Okay. So it looks like, most of the audience today is, already experienced with EDI. Good to know. So okay. So let's, kick, things off here, with today's topics. So there are, of obviously different types of EDI, solutions out there. And, sometimes, what we hear from our, you know, customers is it takes multiple tries to get to the right one. And, you know, beyond, impacting the day to day of IT and operations teams, the choice of EDI also influences business growth. And, you know, we'll talk to so many, customers, partners, prospects, and probably, like, more than a 100 companies at this point. And, the top challenges we heard were, number one, slow onboarding with DDI. So there are unique requirements. Right? Every, trading partner has their unique requirements. And then, there's the need to build end to end automated processes, for each trading partner. And this all makes EDI implementation complex and slow, but on top of that, there are also requirements to go through testing with each trading partner. So just makes this whole process onboarding even slower. And on the business side, slow, onboarding means delays time to revenue. And then, often, when customers go down the path of EDI trading, they don't realize, like, how much they have to invest into the day to day management. So they don't, think about, you know, the errors they'll encounter in their processes or the resources they'll need, to make up for the inefficiencies that are mostly introduced by their, EDI systems. And, especially, like, when working with, complex or black box systems, which we'll talk more about, in a bit, they don't get visibility. Right? What's happening behind the scenes with the EDI processes. So, there's, you know, a lot of time, goes into just figuring out things, troubleshooting things, working with the vendors, and management, cost can really go up. And then if you also add, like, subscription cost to that, especially, like, if you work with a vendor that has, like, transaction based pricing. So those, cost can, skyrocket unexpectedly. And then the other thing is, backlogs in EDI transactions and, noncompliance with trading partner requirements. So these introduce financial penalties. And we heard, like, from some customers, these can be, like, up to 10% of an invoice. So maybe that's on the, extreme case. But these also, you know, hurt the, the customer relationships, and they introduced business risk of being potentially dropped as a a vendor. So, you know, so it is just not enough just to pick a vendor and start EDI trading, so you have to do it the right way. And then you can only achieve b to b growth by being able to, scale your b to b operations, through the right EDI, solution. So, having said that, let's, dive a bit deeper. So and let's still talk a bit about what's typically top of mind for Dynamics 365 ERP customers, one picking an EDI solution, and, also, like, is there native EDI support within existing Microsoft products? So I'll, let, Justin, our Microsoft, expert, talk about this. It's all yours, Justin. Hey. Thank you so much. Yeah. So whenever picking any kind of a solution when you're working into integrations, right, EDI is essentially an integration. So, we wanna look at four different things, four major concerns. You have your onboarding. Right? How is the tool? Is it easy to learn? Is it easy to get it set up? Is it easy to find partners and resources for, first and foremost? Can you manage this in house, or do you need to depend on a third party? There are some solutions that, you know, are closed platforms, and so you have to contract with a very specific company to to achieve certain things, or is this something that you can do a 100% in house? There is a very big cost difference long term, for that type of solution. Finally, the cost. What's it actually gonna cost? Not only in licensing. Remember that first year when you're looking at the licensing, that may not be the total cost. That may be discounted, then you look at your second year, third year. What's it gonna cost in your fifth year? Sometimes it's even worth asking what's it gonna be in in the tenth year. Right? And is there verbiage in the contract saying, you know, it will only increase by x amount for for, you know, year over year costs? Very important to look at. On top of the licensing though, what's the ongoing management and the subscriptions? So if it's $50,000 for the initial installation, and then it's a $100,000 for the, you know, the actual configuration, and then it's x number of dollars per month. That's just an example that's not Celigo specific, but those are three main factors you wanna look at from a cost perspective. There's sometimes a little fourth or fifth ones, fees, overages, make sure you bring all those in there too. But then, another major major point, especially from an ERP perspective, whether you're using, like a NetSuite or Dynamics three sixty five Business Central or d three sixty five Finance and Operations, how integrated is the solution with your application itself? Is there a screen that you can use within Dynamics, to achieve a certain flow, or do you have to pop out to another application and do x y z? Right? What are your training documents ultimately gonna look like? What's the end user experience gonna look like? And those are all really, really important, especially when we're looking at the overall holistic solutioning of our approach. When we say EDI, that's one part of the business with certain parts of a department as an example. Are you gonna integrate a certain way, but are you gonna go over here when it comes to e commerce, right, and integrate a different way? Is b to b gonna be using a different tool than the b to c? Are they two different platforms? Is there some way we can take all these different tools and make them one holistic tool, one resource, one subscription plan, you know, one set of resources deploy? Very important points. And so that's where these, middleware components like Celigo come into play. Right? They're a unified automation solution. So it's not just we're getting, Celigo for just the EDI, but now we have 80 other integrations we have to find solutions for. Sometimes when companies start evolving and growing, they will pick different solutions for different points in their their processes. And the end result is a very overwhelming, you know, set of of skill sets that we need to manage. One person knew the b to c integration, but then they left either on maternity leave or they switched, careers or moved to a different company. Now who's gonna support just that? Or is there one unified solution we can have a unified skill set for? So in in talking about Microsoft, Microsoft customers typically like Microsoft products. You know, Microsoft is a Microsoft first company. You know, they like the the one product, one ecosystem type approach. And there's a couple different tools that you can have in here. Now these are not considered middlewares. They're not a, you know, integration as a service type application. But these are things you're gonna come across in in the field, and I wanna make sure we're talking about them, both pros and cons. So looking at the very first one, we're gonna talk about Power Automate. So Power Automate, I'm sure some of you guys have heard of Power Platform and Dataverse. Power Platform is incredibly low code. Technically, it's no code. It can be, but, you're gonna use expressions within this to build business logic, much like you would have within Excel. So is that really coding? Not really. It's not like you're going in there doing a lot of Python or or c sharp or anything. Right? You can, but this is this is low code. It's meant so that anyone can do it. Yeah. Power Automate, I would really say, is a great integration tool, but you need to be careful because, it can fail. So I would say use it for noncritical workloads or, like, a proof of concept is really good, or if I, as a user, want something very specifically done, and maybe nobody else in the the system needs that, Power Automate would be a fantastic tool. There's also things like, the RPA capabilities, like, you know, like, like an on premise, I'm emulating what a human is doing, you know, click for click. It does have capabilities for that. So there's a time and a place for power automate. Then there's also going into the more, technically inclined, solutions. Azure Logic Apps, I think would be a good middle, middle line of the road. It's a good compromise between Power Automate and Azure functions. Azure functions are very code first, very heavy development. If you ever need to change anything down the road, you need a developer. Sometimes people go nuts with Azure functions, and you have a giant rat's nest, and it is very hard to untangle. So it greatly increases the overall, cost of ownership of a solution. Now when we're also doing these, these can be point to point. They can be for different applications, different connections, etcetera. So the deeper you go into code, the more flexibility, the more power you have, and ultimately, the cheaper the overall Azure costs are because these are all hosted on Azure. But as you go up that chain and get less and less, code heavy, like all the way to Power Automate, there's a lot more overhead, thus a lot more costs associated. So you need to be really careful about that. But then, Azure functions are great for mission critical workloads that you just need to reliably function quickly and and cheaply. Then you have the BizTalk server. So that's still out there quite a bit. It's a dead ended product. Is it deprecated? I'm pretty sure it's been officially deprecated, but the documentation didn't say that. All I can tell you is mainstream support for this, for BizTalk Server 2020 ends 04/11/2028. I have not implemented BizTalk Server in so long. But back in the day, it was it was very, well known and used quite often in the field. So it's not really recommended by Microsoft for integrations anymore. There's a lot of other other tools and techniques out there. Typically, Microsoft, if you're talking to someone there, a solution architect, they will mention, probably logic apps or functions when we're talking EDI. However, remember, these are all independent solutions that you can build for different use cases. It's not a centralized platform, like a Celigo. So, typically, what we'll see is maybe something like a like a Celigo for EDI, and then they'll use these functions for connecting other other applications over time when there's actually another solution for Celigo to really handle all of these, and and we've seen that quite a bit in the field. And so with that, I think that's my section. And any questions that you have, please put those in the q and a. I'm happy to go, go deep dive here. I could talk another sixty minutes, but, I don't wanna don't wanna bogart the whole stage. Thank you so much, Justin. That were those were great insights on, you know, automation integration solutions on the Microsoft ecosystem. And I would like to, you know, follow-up on that, conversation and then look at, you know, third party EDI solutions, that are popular, for Dynamics three sixty five, customers. And, I like to think these into, two categories. So first one is the traditional self-service EDI, and typically, this is through legacy iPaaS providers. And then the second one, and perhaps it's the more popular option, is fully managed EDI offered by a specialized, vendor. So, let's start, with the self-service option first, and I like calling these, complex EDI. Because with these type of solutions, every trading partner and every integration for that trading partner needs to be implemented from scratch and requires coding every single time. So there's a heavy developer dependency here, and, this contributes to long project times, right, contributes to project cost going up, and also results in poor agility because every change you need to make, again, is dependent on your developer resources. And, perhaps, you know, the complexity of these traditional self-service, EDI options have, contributed to the growing popularity of the other category here, which is fully managed EDI, typically referred in the industry as, black box EDI. So, while the intention here is, you know, to take a hands off approach to EDI, the reality is very different. Like, we've heard it from so many different, you know, customers, partners, prospects. So these vendors, first of all, they provide, very little visibility and no control over EDI processes. So what that means is whenever there's an issue, like, we hear that resolution, takes a long cycle of back and forth with the vendor to, even understand what's going on and then, continues back and forth to just get it fixed. So issue resolution can be super slow, and, it can also impact trading partner relationships. Right? Because, these issues can if they are not resolved, they'll lead to chargebacks. And then, even for change request. So dependency on the vendors here exist. And, again, it is slow, to introduce those changes. And then when we look into the implementation side of things, implementations can be slow too because at the end of the day, you're really, dependent on the availability and expertise of those third party allocated resources, which you basically share with their other customers. So they are your project might not be always on top of their, priority list. And, especially, things can get super slow when dealing with niche trading partners that they have never implemented before. And then the biggest surprise working with these vendors is typically the transaction based pricing model. So as the business grows, they sell more monthly subscription cost go up. And then what we hear is once it goes up, it is up. Like, for example, if it goes up due to seasonality, let's say you're a drop shipping vendor, it goes up during the season, high peak season, There's no way to revert back the cost. It stays there. So, yeah, cost can get really high. And then, you know, the, other things that these providers, they'll focus is really on EDI. So they don't provide a full b to b solution. And we know, you know, today, there are some vendors actually that lets, you trade through APIs with them. And if that's the case, you would need to implement API based b to b trading on a separate platform. So you'd have end up working with, multiple, vendors. And this is where, you know, Celigo and b to b manager, fill in this gap. So we, have a simplified self-service EDI solution that brings a long needed more modern e approach to EDI. So first of all, unlike the complex self-service, EDI through traditional iPaaS, we provide efficiencies for EDI implementations through prebuilt trading partner connectors that capture, each partner's unique requirements and trading partner documents out of the box. And that these, you know, along with our platforms, reusable integration building plus, like, for example, once an integration to Dynamics three sixty five is built, it will take your team's much less effort to implement the automation for the second and third trading partners. So you'll achieve faster time to trade. And, second, customers have full visibility and control over their, EDI, transactions and also b two b integrations. They'll have full visibility into mapping. They can, introduce changes on the fly and proactively fix issues without any third party dependency. And that costs are lower. First of all, through the efficiencies into implementation and management of EDI, your teams will spend less hours on EDI. So that's one piece. And then, being, proactive means less chargebacks. Right? You'll be able to fix issues, before they, get attention from your trading partners. But then we also have a a predictable pricing model, which is based on the number of trading partners and document types, so there are no surprises in cost. And then, last, this approach provides scalability for your IT and EDI resources, and all, you know, while providing a unified b to b integration solution that can support both EDI and API based, transactions, in one place. So and, you know, just, adding to what Justin already mentioned here. So Celigo is a platform. Right? So beyond EDI, it supports all your business processes and supports all different integration patterns you may need in one place. It provides the central management and government, to integration so you don't have to, work with multiple, vendors. You don't have to, learn how to manage multiple tools. So anything from ecommerce order to, fulfillment automation to bringing expand data into a data warehouse from, you know, different, ad channels for, ROI analysis or just, you know, EDI between trading partners and Dynamics three sixty five, for use cases like buy side, sell side, three p l, which can be, fully automated on the, on the platform. So, having, you know, said all of that, you know, now I would like to call Meryl on stage, so you she can, you know, talk about their EDI, journey. Thank you for joining us again, Meryl. So can you just, talk about your EDI journey, how you started, how it evolved, and then how you ended up with, Celigo's b two b manager? It's all yours. Yeah. Definitely. So we were using, a different vendor for our EDI services. But earlier this year, we were migrating to Business Central. So we were just going through this whole software migration, and it kind of opened the door to reevaluating all of our technical decisions. We already use Celigo and love it for our API flows with a lot of different customer interactions. We love it for a lot of reasons, but their support team is great. It's pretty, like, developer friendly, but it's also very non developer friendly. So our nontechnical staff can go in and, like, read errors or or process things or kinda be hands on in a really helpful way. So when we were trying to decide, you know, what to do with our EDI solution, we met with Celigo team, and they kinda gave us the walk through with their existing trading partners, and how all those connections are prebuilt. That was really attractive to us. And then they kind of explained, like, they'll help set up the initial connection, and then it's kind of handing it off to us. So kind of as, Justin was mentioning that, ongoing fixes and and costs, it was really nice to keep that in house for so many reasons. Our previous vendor, you know, if if we had to map, like, one new field, you know, and we have to basically start an entire project and scope it and charge for it by hour, and it was really expensive. And then slow because we had to wait for, you know, all that process. So we just love Celigo because if now that that initial connection's there, if the developer needs to go in and make a quick adjustment, it's really easy. Working with Celigo technical team too was awesome, and they respond so fast, and they really understood our business needs and helped to create that connection. So, yeah, we're really happy with with Celigo's b two b manager. Perfect. That's great to hear. Thank you so much, Meryl. Now I would like to, invite Blake on stage so he can talk about their journey at Groove Life. Yeah. Thank you, Hugo. Yeah. So we are a small start up company. And, as we've grown, we had to adopt EDI as part of our relationship with some of our key retail relationships. And so it's been a learning process from the beginning. And when you're learning what you don't know, it's great to have a managed service provider that can help bring you up to speed on what you don't know and to manage those those relationships that are very valuable. And so we had a different member to help us get off the ground. But it very quickly became quite expensive because we had a few key drop ship relationships. And so the, the payment structure was based on a per document fee. And, you know, like was mentioned earlier, when you get into q four and drop ship sales skyrocket, so did the price of of the platform. And so, we reevaluated at one point, how we could save money on our EDI model. And so we actually found a a much smaller company that was a subscription based model. And so, we pulled the trigger on making that decision, moved all of our relationships over to this new, vendor and quickly realized that we maybe made the wrong decision in the fact that the amount of chargebacks that we received due to incorrect setup and, you know, things being sent out incorrectly, the the cost for charge chargebacks were eating into the amount that we were saving on the subscription model. And the service wasn't great. There was very long lead times to bring a new trading partner onto the platform. So we ended up switching back to our previous vendor, to get the relationship side, in a place that was better suited for our key accounts. And so that was more important to us than paying a little bit extra for the service. But it still it included a lot of back and forth for every request, like Meryl, you know, hinted out there. It was long lead times for bringing somebody onto our platform when we started fresh with them. And so we were really looking for a solution that balanced the cost and the speed and the service and the scalability. And so we we too had Celigo, as a relationship using it for API connections, across our company. And so when the b to b manager became a thing and was, you know, something that we were interested in, It checked a lot of those boxes, and so we we met with Celigo team to understand more of, the program or the platform and how it is, you know, checking all those boxes. And so it is a seamless integration because of the fact that we already have a relationship with Celigo. We have an understanding of how the platform works. We have people within our organization that are very, very well versed in how to set up Celigo flows, and that made it easy for us to have those technical conversations with our trading partners. It's all internal, so we're not having to go through a middleman, to explain to them we need, you know, that field that is important to us in our business to go there within Business Central. We could kinda have those conversations internally and and move much more quickly, which made the onboarding process a lot more quickly for us, and probably saved a lot of money with that. Less chargebacks because we know how to make adjustments on the fly and make, changes to the flows if they were necessary and ensure that they were actually made and not have repeat offenses to those same chargebacks time and time again. And, yeah, it helped us get all of those boxes checked. We were able to have, you know, speed to to market on those connections. We were able to create great service for our retail partners. The cost is great because it's not, you know, per document necessarily like previous vendors were. And it helps us scale for future because the, the the depth of connection that Celigo has made across anybody using b to b manager, you know, it becomes available for everybody else. So there's a a library of of connections that you can access. So if you are onboarding a new retailer and somebody else has made that connection, then you're able to tap into those specs, which is hugely helpful. And, yeah, the the Celigo expertise and support team are helpful with, you know, advisory hours or, different ways to get help with their support team that is crucial. So it's been great experience for us. That's great to hear, Blake. Thank you so much, for sharing your journey with us. So I guess so we are approaching towards the end of the webinar. So if you have any questions, right now is a great time to put them into q and a. Justin, would you like to, summarize key takeaways for our audience here? Okay. Maybe, I will just go through these. So as a, you know, summary, what we heard today was that, there are, you know, Microsoft has, native integration and automation products, but none of these are purpose built to support EDI. And then we talked about legacy EDI solutions as we learned these are slow, expensive, and they don't scale. And, so based on our learnings, our recommendation, you know, to, companies out there looking to, implement the new EDI solution is that they should prioritize, their investment for long term scalability, agility, and cost predictability so that they can future proof their operations. And, also, we recommend thinking beyond EDI because there are so many other integrations, automations, your, business, needs to manage and implement. And to get the most out of your, Dynamics three sixty five, investments, it will help you to take a unit to, to build a unified, automation, strategy. And, so this is where Celigo comes in. It provides you with one platform to centrally manage all your integrations in one place. Right? Whether it's application to application integrations, b two b integrations, or API integrations. And, our b two b manager, product, provides a simplified approach, to self-service EDI that enables, teams to move faster with full visibility, control, and predictable costs, and no dependency on third parties. So that was a a summary of today's, key takeaways. So if you would like to, you know, continue the conversation and perhaps see a a live demo of how everything works, we have a request of demo button here on top. You can just click on that, and we can, schedule one, for you. And, we are also attending upcoming Microsoft Community Summit. So if you can scan the, QR code here and set up a meeting with us, So we will have EDI experts, there, and you can talk to them, discuss about your integration strategies, and, discuss about solutions to your existing, challenges. And we also actually put together some resources for you. So on the right, under docs, you'll see feel, find some blogs, some guides, that will, help you learn more about, ETI for Microsoft Dynamics 365. Okay. And now, we are on the q and a session, session, and I saw we already had some, questions here. The first question I see is, I have a colleague who couldn't make it live. Is the session being recorded? Yes. It is being recorded, and that all registered will, receive the recording so they can watch it if they couldn't make it to the live session today. And then another question I see is let's see. Okay. So, for Celigo EDI with b to b manager, is there an option for outsourced implementation? Yes. There is. An option for, outsourced implementation. So while, you know, the goal with the product is really to, bring, efficiencies into EDI implementation, you know, through the availability of prebuilt trading partners, document types, reusable EDI integration flows. We understand, you know, not all customers will have the resources or bandwidth, to, take on EDI, projects at a given time. So that's why we offer manage implementation through our professional services, but also, through select qualified partners, within the Microsoft ecosystem. And maybe I will take one last question here. Let me see. Does b two b manager also work with Dynamics three sixty five finance and operations? Yes. Absolutely. B two b manager, is an ERP ERP agnostic product. So as as long as there's connectivity, you can, connect your trading partners to any ERP systems and automate your, processes. And we also have prebuilt, connectors for, Microsoft three, sixty five's finance and operations, which will help you to achieve faster time to value. So the rest of the questions will be answering offline, due to our time limitations here. But thank you everyone for joining us today, and thank you to our, speakers for taking the time. So I hope you all found this, a useful, webinar, and, take care. Bye.