For IT and innovation managers
EDI alternative: partner onboarding in days
Classical EDI takes four to twelve weeks per partner. Chainfill onboards partners in days by letting the mapping be learned instead of built.
- Partner onboarding
- Days
- Not weeks per partner
- EDI, PDF and email
- One platform
- For every incoming format
In numbers
EDI covers only a fraction of freight traffic
- 1%
- Just over 1% of all consignment notes in the Netherlands were an eCMR in 2022 (638,852 in total).
- 4–12 weeks
- Of IT work per new classical EDI partner. For the long tail of smaller partners that rarely pays off.
For forwarders and transport companies with many smaller partners that means: you only roll out classical EDI profitably for the top of your partner base. The long tail stays manual: four to twelve weeks of IT work per new EDI partner is rarely justifiable there.
Classical EDI works fine for the first twenty large, stable partners. But the vast majority of Dutch freight traffic still lives outside structured digital formats. In 2022, 638,852 eCMRs were issued in the Netherlands, just over 1% of all freight notes. The rest still runs on paper, PDF, email, or partner-specific layouts.
The problem
Why classical EDI no longer fits
- 01
Four to twelve weeks per new partner. IT projects and regression tests every single time.
- 02
Hand-written mappings that silently break under schema drift. A partner renames a field and the delivery fails downstream with no clear error.
- 03
Three different products for EDI, PDF, and email: three teams, three SLAs, three sets of bugs.
In the product
Peb builds the mapping, you approve it
Documents in any format pass through one AI pipeline directly into your existing ERP, TMS or WMS. No partner-specific broker, no hand-written mapping per stream. For the long-tail partner base, that pipeline is the practical EDI alternative: same TMS schema, none of the per-partner integration cost.
Message from your partner
UNH+1+IFCSUM:D:04A:UN' BGM+785+NFL-240817+9' NAD+CZ+++NORTHLINE FREIGHT' LOC+9+GBFXT:139:6' DTM+200:202610200800:203' LOC+8+GBBHM:139:6' EQD+CN+MSKU4821937+45G1' MEA+AAE+G+KGM:18400'
Peb proposes the mapping
- 23 fields mapped
- 2 of 2 test messages converted
Order in your TMS
- Reference
- NFL-240817
- Collection
- Felixstowe, 20 Oct
- Delivery
- Birmingham, 21 Oct
- Status
- Created
How it works
How a new partner gets onboarded
Hand over two samples
Forward two real documents from your new partner in whatever format they send. No spec exchange, no template build-out.
AI proposes the mapping
Chainfill recognises the profile, suggests field mappings, and surfaces splits, concatenations, and array iterations in a diff view. When a partner later renames a field or changes a type, Chainfill warns before the order breaks downstream.
Verify in the mock server
Run the proposed mapping against the partner's real schema in the built-in mock server. Adjust where needed before anything goes live.
Go live in days
Switch the connection on via HTTPS or SFTP. No waiting in line behind other IT work, no regression suite per partner.
Stories from our customers
Logistics companies already growing without extra people.
Customer story
- of orders automatic
- 90%
“Since going live in October, Hartog Transport now processes 90% of its order flow automatically with Chainfill. A process that previously required many manual steps has become a much more efficient and scalable way of working.”
The result
Partner onboarding before and after Chainfill
Classical EDI onboarding is an IT project per partner. Chainfill makes it ops-driven. This is the lead-time difference.
Classical EDI-VAN onboarding
4–12 weeks
IT project per partner: exchange spec, hand-written mappings, change-control, regression testing.
Ops-driven with Chainfill
Days
You hand over two sample documents, AI proposes the mapping, you verify in the mock server and go live via HTTPS or SFTP.
Up to five partners in the time of one classical EDI project
Lead time based on classical EDI-VAN onboarding cycles of 4–12 weeks, versus days for ops-driven onboarding. Lead time improves further as Chainfill learns from supervised corrections.
Lead times compared with classical EDI-VAN onboarding.
Frequently asked questions
Finn Loots
Founder
Is your question not listed?
Call or email us. You will hear back from someone who knows the product.
Ready to remove the manual work?
See where Chainfill can save time in your document, email, and system workflows.