High-Volume EDI: Processing 30,000 EDI Transactions/Day

Since 1999, B2BGateway has provided a fully managed EDI & API Connectivity solution for thousands of clients, enabling businesses to connect to major retailers, third party logistic services and many other partners worldwide. EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the structured transmission of business data, such as purchase orders, invoices, and shipping notices, between organizations. B2BGateway integrates with various platforms, including many ERP & accounting platforms, warehouse management systems, inventory & order management systems, eCommerce platforms and others.

With more than 20 years in the industry, B2BGateway helps customers automate their supply chain and, in turn, they eliminate manual data entry, improve order accuracy, increase speed & efficiency, reduce labor costs, and avert costly EDI chargebacks from trading partners to generate ROI from EDI.

Managing more than 500 customer connections to Amazon alone, B2BGateway processes a vast 30,000 EDI transactions per day via AS2.

But when Amazon changed their AS2 security requirements, B2BGateway would face a problem that threatened their Amazon connectivity.

The Challenge: Evolving Security Requirements

AS2 is the most commonly used secure data transit protocol for sending and receiving EDI files and is required for an Amazon EDI integration.

When Amazon required modern AES encryption for all AS2 clients and servers, any AS2 communication solution that lacked this requirement could no longer connect to Amazon. And it just so happened that B2BGateway's AS2 Amazon customer connections were reliant on an AS2 vendor lacking AES encryption.

It was time for a new AS2 solution.

The Solution: Secure, High-Availability, API-Driven AS2

As an EDI & API connectivity solution provider with a network spanning thousands of companies, B2BGateway required a high level of sophistication in its AS2 solution, in addition to the AES encryption Amazon required:

• A powerful admin API that enabled complete customization
• The capability to handle a high volume of EDI transactions — more than 30k/day
• Total scalability with a load-balanced, high-availability setup
• All the baseline AS2 capabilities of an EDI solution, such as MDNs, auto-retry and others
• And of course, affordable scalability

For all these reasons, ArcESB was the optimal choice.

"One of the main requirements was an API, because we had built tools to integrate with our previous AS2 software so that our less technical staff could implement AS2 connections," said Jill Nowak, Senior Innovations Programmer, B2BGateway. “We needed to connect our tools to your tools, and the admin API gave us the capability to do so." 

In fact, B2BGateway managed almost all updates through the API, such as adding connections, handling uncommon scenarios, and making changes to connections, URLs, and IDs. But they take advantage of the user-friendly web interface ArcESB provides, utilizing it each day for easy monitoring.

In addition, B2BGateway leveraged the flexible deployment options and extensibility ArcESB offers, using a high-availability, load-balanced setup across multiple servers that ensures maximum uptime and high-volume transaction processing.

"We currently have two servers in a load-balanced, high-availability solution, which is fantastic because we only had one server previously," Nowak said. “Now, if we want to make updates, we can take one offline and make updates with the other."

Results: 600 Connections and Counting

Not only has B2BGateway been able to fully comply with Amazon's stringent security requirements, they've also scaled up their EDI business even more.

To date, B2BGateway has migrated 600 connections from their previous AS2 tool to ArcESB. Within B2BGateway's four walls, ArcESB is handling all new AS2 connections, and B2BGateway has the process of adding & migrating connections down to a science, using an application they built and connected to ArcESB via its admin API.

"We're always getting new clients who have new trading partners, and Amazon requires testing and production connections for each division, such as the US, Canada, and the EU," Nowak said. “We really have to make it as hands off and easy as we can for our less technical staff."

Now, the average day sees more than 10k transactions over ArcESB, and the peak is much higher.

"The busiest day of the year is either Cyber Monday or the day after. The peak was over 45,000 transactions* *on the ArcESB servers alone," Nowak said.

In the next year, B2BGateway plans to migrate another 900 connections to ArcESB and handle more than 3x the transaction volume per day.