Bills of lading, manifests, packing lists, proofs of delivery and hazardous materials declarations, read off whatever they arrive on and sent as the transaction your partner is waiting for. X12 and EDIFACT, for freight, terminal and logistics operations.
The category
Electronic data interchange (EDI) is how two companies exchange business documents system to system, without a person retyping them. A load tender, a ship notice, a delivery status and an invoice each travel as a structured message in a format both sides agreed on ahead of time. ANSI X12 is the standard across North America. EDIFACT is the international equivalent.
The transaction sets are the vocabulary. A 204 tenders a load, a 214 reports where it got to, an 856 says what is on the vehicle, a 210 bills for it. Those messages move over AS2, SFTP or a value-added network, and a 997 comes back to confirm each one arrived and parsed.
That part of the problem is well solved, and plenty of vendors solve it. The part that stays broken is the half of the document trail that never starts in a system at all.
The gap
A chargeback lands because a status message went out late, and nobody can reconstruct why.
Onboarding one new customer takes a quarter and an outside consultant.
The same shipment gets keyed into the portal, the TMS and a spreadsheet on its way out of the gate.
Your proof of delivery is a photo on a driver's phone, and the invoice waits behind it.
Every one of those is a document that existed before the message did. The delay is the distance between the two.
Capabilities
Nine areas, grouped around the way documents actually move through an operation instead of around a list of supported formats.
A bill of lading photographed at the gate, a manifest emailed as a PDF, a packing list that came off a fax. All three get read into the same fields as a structured message, and land on the same job record. Nobody rekeys them into a portal.
Mapping is done against documents that already went out the door instead of against a specification in a PDF. Load tendered becomes a 204, arrived at stop becomes a 214, packed becomes an 856. Adding a segment a partner insists on is a configuration change rather than a release.
Each partner gets their own map, their own connection and their own test cycle, tracked to go-live rather than handed to a consultant and chased. AS2, SFTP and value-added networks all terminate in the same place.
A 997 comes back for each message, or it does not, and the ones that do not get chased before a chargeback lands. The trail shows what was sent, when, and what came back, so a late status message stops being an argument.
Unknown SKUs, weights outside tolerance and missing hazmat classes get held in a queue with the reason attached. Everything that validates goes straight through. The team sees the three that need a decision instead of the twelve hundred that do not.
Hazardous materials have no transaction set of their own. They ride as segments inside the tender and the ship notice, which is exactly why they get out of step with what is on the trailer. Opsima keeps the declaration attached to the job and checks it before the vehicle leaves.
A delivery confirmed by a driver, a detention hold called in over the radio and an EDI 214 from a customer all become the same event on the same job. This is the half of the document trail that never starts in a system.
The 214 that confirms delivery is what triggers the 210, with accessorials and wait time already attached from the job record. Invoices stop waiting behind a photo on someone's phone.
SAP, Oracle, Priority and NetSuite stay your main system. Opsima reads what they already hold and writes structured records back into them. IT reviews and signs off the rollout in staging before it goes live.
Transaction sets
The freight and logistics sets in common use. Anything a partner asks for that is not here gets mapped during onboarding.
A customer offers you a load, with stops, equipment type and rate. Accepting it creates the job.
Billed from the job record, with accessorials and wait time already attached rather than reconstructed.
What is on the vehicle and who is responsible for it. Often the document that starts as paper at the gate.
Arrived, loaded, departed, delivered. The one partners measure you on, and the one that goes out late.
Gate in, gate out, discharged, available. What the terminal knows and the inland side is waiting for.
The commercial invoice for goods, as distinct from the freight charge on a 210.
What a customer wants, in what quantity, by when. The document the whole chain hangs off.
The packing list in structured form: what is on the vehicle, packed how, in what order it comes off.
Confirms a transaction arrived and parsed. Its absence is the earliest warning you get that something broke.
Hazardous materials declarations have no transaction set of their own. They ride as segments inside the 204 and the 856, which is exactly why they drift out of step with what is actually on the trailer.
The difference
System to system, EDI works. A message leaves one ERP, arrives at another, gets acknowledged, and the whole exchange takes seconds. Every vendor in the category can do that, and has been able to for thirty years.
The breakage is at the other end. A driver signs for a delivery on paper at a loading dock. A checker calls in a damaged pallet over the radio. A bill of lading arrives as a photograph taken in the rain. Somebody has to see each of those and turn it into a message, and until they do, the partner is waiting and the invoice is parked.
Opsima closes that stretch. Field events get captured through the channels your crews already use, read into the same fields as a structured document, and emitted as the transaction the partner expects. The 214 goes out when the delivery happened, rather than when someone got back to a desk.
In the field
The same mechanism drives document flow. The work was always happening, and the record was not. Taavura's Earth Moving Division runs the same layer across quarries and infrastructure sites, after ERP integrations had already failed to stick with field crews.
Delivery
Your existing VAN or EDI broker stays where it is and your partners see no change. Opsima adds the capture layer in front of it, so the documents that start as paper, photos or a radio call reach it as structured data. IT reviews and signs off the rollout in staging before it goes live.
When per-kilocharacter fees and a change request for every new partner stop matching what you get, Opsima builds the replacement around your documents and your partners. It runs on your servers or ours. Working software ships in weeks, and you pay once it earns its place.
Goes deeper
Every category Opsima builds, and how EDI fits alongside them.
Dispatch, loads and billing, with these documents attached to the job.
SAP, Oracle, Navis, telematics and the rest of your systems.
Whether the vehicle behind the load is actually fit to run.
FAQ
Bring one partner whose status messages are always late. We map it on your real documents and run it with you. You pay only after it goes live.