Creating custom EDIFACT message with B2B adapter has never been so easy before.

This blog is created based on a following problem.

A big office supplies company was trying to send out shipment/delivery data information to the carriers based in France. The standard dispatch manifest format for the carriers in France is an EDIFACT based message called INOVERT DISPOR. As you can imagine SAP does not provide this format as a standard EDIFACT message in the B2B adapter.

This means we would need to build one from scratch.

First we needed to get the hold of the DISPOR  version 3.2 structure documentation and analyse the data.

This can be found at http://www.gtff.org/abonnes?langue=en

After the data has been analyzed we need to find a edifact version that is similar to the DISPOR structure. This is needed because we need a basic edifact message to start from.

In this case any 99+ version of IFTMIN or IFCSUM is sufficient.

In order to create our own custom version of an edifact message we will need to copy the control key of this standard EDIFACT message. A control key uses the indicators to determine how a message is to be processed in the control key list.

After we copy the control key we will need to create message with custom name and version

The options provided are creating a new version of the existing message and totally new message and version.

In this scenario we will create new message and version for DISPOR.

First we need to check if all the fields are present in the copied message structure.

We can do that in the DATA ELEMENTS menu.

In this case there are several fields that don’t exist yet. we can create them using the create data element and providing the correct specification.

Creating a new data element:

After we have created all the missing data elements we need to do the same for the Composites. Also we need to check the existing composites if they contain the correct data elements. Composites simplify administration of the Segments. They consist of single elements combined automatically. This means you can expand the structure very easy and very fast.

We need also to check the status of the fields (mandatory/conditional).

When all the composites are created and checked we then need to create our custom structure segments that are missing from the copied message

In this case we created an ICC segment containing also the custom made data elements.

In case you didn’t notice yet , the best way to build a custom edifact message is by bottom up. When all the data elements , composites and segments are created and checked, it’s time to build the message. You can also create the Segment Groups and add them to the main message.

This is how a customized edifact message looks like:

After the creation of the message we need to export the xsd and import it into SAP PO.

Importing the xsd means we have to create the data type in sap PO with name matching our xsd and the edifact structure.

After that we can map all the necessary fields and activate the mapping.

Here below are the examples of the mappings and output. The scenario is IDOC to EDIFACT  exported to a SFTP server.

Mapping:

Mapping Test

Output Result:

This data can now be processed by any DISPOR 3.2 version adapter on the customer’s side.