If you’re selling to big-box retailers like Target or Walmart, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a non-negotiable. Without the proper EDI in place, you’re facing time-consuming manual work, costly custom solutions, a higher risk of errors and non-compliance charges. 

Despite its importance, many businesses still overlook EDI. Established decades ago, EDI is a computer-to-computer exchange of business documents using an industry-standard electronic format.

This makes ShipHawk’s recent integration with TrueCommerce especially valuable for growing businesses. TrueCommerce specializes in automating EDI, providing your business with streamlined and compliant solutions as it scales.

Why EDI Still Matters

Although EDI was invented in the 1960s, there’s nothing old-school about it. In fact, it is still the standard for doing business with many trading partners. In a relationship between retailers and suppliers, various buying documents are exchanged. The most common of these documents include: purchase orders, transfer orders, return authorizations, and advanced shipping notices (ASNs).

With EDI, your business can automatically exchange these crucial documents with your trading partners. ASNs are especially critical to the success of a shipment because they let retailers know what is coming to the warehouse, when it will arrive, and how much space they need to prepare for the incoming shipments. Without accurate ASNs, retailers risk rejecting shipments, delaying processing, and encountering inventory issues, all of which can delay payments. Mismatches between the ASN and the actual shipment can also result in significant financial penalties and potential loss of business.

The bottom line is, if your business is selling to large retailers, EDI isn’t just a helpful tool to have—it’s mandatory to ensure smooth transactions and build lasting relationships.

What TrueCommerce Does

TrueCommerce is a leading provider of EDI solutions and is the crucial link that connects your business to the complex world of order management. It can be thought of as your EDI translator that also ensures data flows seamlessly between ShipHawk, an ERP like NetSuite, and the retailer.

TrueCommerce eliminates one of the biggest pain points for customers: managing complex EDI requirements without a custom development team or manual work. Serving as a central platform, TrueCommerce ensures compliance with retailer demands and scales effortlessly as your order volume multiplies.

When a shipment is booked in ShipHawk, the shipment data must be sent to TrueCommerce so it can be forwarded to the vendor. Previously, this required creating custom mappings to take the shipment data written back to the ERP by ShipHawk and send it to TrueCommerce’s tables. Now, with a new integration in place, customers using both TrueCommerce and ShipHawk no longer need to create these custom mappings. The integration ensures that TrueCommerce automatically receives all the necessary information.

Without this integration, your business has to manually transfer data from ShipHawk to EDI systems. With the newly built TrueCommerce integration, the data flows automatically from ShipHawk to TrueCommerce, eliminating the need for extra hires, maintenance, and custom configuration.

Currently, the TrueCommerce - ShipHawk integration is only available for NetSuite, but this will grow over time into other ERPs.

From Order to ASN: How the EDI Integration Flows

Once integrated with ShipHawk and NetSuite, TrueCommerce becomes the connection hub for order and shipment data between systems and partners. Here’s a more detailed breakdown of the data transfer:

1. A retailer sends an order to your business via EDI.
2. TrueCommerce receives and translates this order, then sends it to NetSuite.
3. NetSuite creates the Sales Order.
4. The Sales Order triggers fulfillment and is passed to ShipHawk.
5. ShipHawk packs and ships the order.
6. Tracking and shipment information flows back to NetSuite and TrueCommerce
7. TrueCommerce generates the ASN through NetSuite and sends it to the retailer in the correct EDI format. 

This seamless loop means that all of your systems are automated and synchronized. With the help of TrueCommerce, retailer requirements are met automatically, which means fulfillment is faster and more accurate.

Transaction Manager Online: Making EDI Faster and Easier

The ShipHawk and TrueCommerce integration goes a step further with Transaction Manager Online (TMO)—a web-based solution that helps businesses connect their supply chain and manage transactions. With TMO, businesses can push EDI data from their ERP to ShipHawk, and automatically generate outbound ASNs without any manual work.

Key benefits include:

• Push EDI data pushed from ERP to ShipHawk
• Support for outbound Advance Shipping Notices (ASNs)
• Support for No Pack, Standard, Pick and Pack, Pallet Pick and Pack ASNs, Consolidation
• Populate the TrueCommerce package and content line items in NetSuite for EDI so that you can avoid manual processes to populate EDI content when using TrueCommerce

The integration delivers:

• Automated process, no manual intervention
• Integration with ShipHawk APIs for secure, trusted connectivity
• No customizations required
• Intuitive user experience

Here’s a closer look at how the integration flows between ShipHawk, NetSuite, and TrueCommerce’s Transaction Manager Online (TMO):

1. The Transaction Manager calls NetSuite to get shipment numbers. The Transaction Manager filters item fulfillment records based on customer, status, date, and so on.
2. The Transaction Manager calls ShipHawk to retrieve the shipment.
3. The shipment is then mapped to the Transaction Manager, to create the ASN.

This smooth, automated workflow helps ensure accurate, timely ASNs while reducing manual effort and errors.

Ready to Eliminate EDI Hassles?

If you are an expanding business that uses NetSuite in addition to ShipHawk, you already know how powerful these tools are together. Your ERP helps you manage inventory, orders, and finances, while ShipHawk handles the warehouse, fulfillment and shipping side. TrueCommerce completes the puzzle by removing EDI roadblocks and growing with your business. This integration reduces manual work, cuts costs, and ensures you're meeting retailer compliance requirements with ease. With seamless data flow and faster fulfillment, your business can operate more efficiently than ever before. Discover what seamless EDI automation can do–contact us today to schedule a demo.