Connecting Infor M3 to a Cloud EDI Platform

ERP systems can be overwhelming based on their size and complexity. They handle the most mission critical parts of a business. Every business is unique and their ERP systems are all set up differently. If you’re running EDI transactions through an Infor M3 ERP system, you’ll recall how much time and effort it took to get it up and running.

As you’re building new EDI connections from Infor M3 to your trading partners, you should know what you’re in for—and why it makes sense to consider an API platform for your EDI needs.

Why is it so complicated to set up EDI within your Infor M3 ERP? The answer lies in the unique challenges of each install of Infor M3. Every company has its own distinct business processes. Therefore, they set up their ERP system to run in a specific way.

For example, let’s say milk company (Moo) and shoe company (Happy Feet) are within the retail industry and run Infor M3. Even though they’re both on Infor M3, the way they configure their ERP system could be completely different. How your customer master is setup can vary greatly depending on if you ship to a store or distribution center. For example, Moo might set up their customer master on a payer level. However, Happy Feet may set it up on a store level. This causes a big difference in how data is stored in the ERP. It changes the way data needs to be input and extracted.

It can take a considerable amount of time to figure out what fields are required and how to properly map the data. Some companies outsource this task to consultants, while others have IT teams that handle it in-house. Either way, it’s a costly and time-consuming process.

There’s an alternative to building these custom integrations. You can leverage a common API endpoint that does the heavy lifting for you.

Unlike legacy EDI providers out there in the market, Orderful offers a cloud EDI solution that makes it easy to connect to Infor M3. Our years of experience with Infor, allow us to understand the complex logic associated with EDI transactions across industry verticals. Our team has put together all of the potential API transactions, the potential fields in the ERP and built that into our platform. How exactly does it work?

Once you connect your Infor M3 ERP to Orderful, our platform integrates with your ERP giving you standard integrations per EDI transaction type. The data coming into our platform gets validated against your trading partners’ guidelines. Orderful’s API consumes the data in a normalized way and converts it into your trading partners requirements for you. This means that we can quickly implement standard one-time integrations that don’t change. We can also enable Infor M3 customers to trade data with the world.

Let’s go back to our example where Moo and Happy Feet both use Infor M3. With Orderful, because Infor M3’s APIs don’t change between instances, we’re able to reuse our integrations from company to company regardless of what vertical our customers are in. The result is rapid access to the Orderful API that enables companies to trade EDI data immediately with any trading partner.

To learn more, schedule time to connect with one of our EDI experts here.