EDI & ASN Solutions
Your supply chain, speaking one language—so nothing gets lost in translation.
What We Do
Plain English: Every time your business ships a product to a retailer, distributor, or trading partner, there's an invisible conversation that has to happen between your systems and theirs—before the truck arrives, while it's in transit, and after it's received. That conversation is EDI: Electronic Data Interchange. It's the language that supply chains speak. And if your business speaks it poorly—or not at all—it costs you. Chargebacks. Rejected shipments. Compliance violations. Fines that eat your margins while your team scrambles to figure out what went wrong. We make that conversation fluent. We build, implement, and manage the EDI systems that let your business communicate seamlessly with the biggest retailers and distributors in the country—Walmart, ALDI, Costco, Kroger, and dozens more—without your team having to become EDI experts. We handle the Advance Ship Notices (ASNs) that tell your trading partners exactly what's on the truck before it arrives. We generate the GS1-128 labels that let warehouses scan and receive your pallets without a hitch. We manage the purchase orders, invoices, and functional acknowledgments that keep your supply chain moving and your relationships intact. And when something breaks—because in EDI, something always breaks—we're the team that finds it, fixes it, and makes sure it doesn't break the same way twice.
Technical: End-to-end EDI implementation, integration, and managed services across the full X12 transaction set, with deep specialization in EDI 856 (Advance Ship Notice/ASN) generation and compliance. Our capabilities include: EDI 850 (Purchase Order), 810 (Invoice), 856 (ASN), 855 (PO Acknowledgment), 860 (PO Change), 997 (Functional Acknowledgment), and 824 (Application Advice) transaction processing, 855 (Purchase Order Acknowledgment), 875 (Grocery Purchase Order), and 880 (Grocery Invoice); GS1-128/UCC-128 barcode label generation with SSCC-18 serialization; hierarchical ASN structure design (SOPI, SOTI, SOTPI, SOITP) tailored to trading partner specifications; AS2 and SFTP communication protocol configuration; XML/EDI translation and mapping; trading partner onboarding and specification interpretation; VAN (Value-Added Network) integration and management; real-time EDI monitoring, error detection, and exception handling; ERP and WMS system integration via API, flat file, or direct database connectivity; and custom automation for document generation, validation, and transmission workflows. We support compliance requirements across major retail, grocery, and distribution networks including Walmart, ALDI, Costco, Kroger, Whole Foods, and specialty trading partners with non-standard requirements.
Who It's For
Manufacturers & Producers
You make the product. You're proud of the product. But getting it onto retail shelves requires a technology handshake with every trading partner you serve—and each one has different rules, different formats, and zero patience for mistakes.
Food & Beverage Distributors
Your margins are tight, your volume is high, and a single ASN error can mean a rejected load, a chargeback, or a pallet sitting on a dock going bad. You need EDI that works every time, not most of the time.
Growing Suppliers
You just landed your first major retail account—Walmart, ALDI, a regional grocery chain—and they handed you a compliance guide that reads like a foreign language. You need a partner who can translate it and execute it, fast.
Companies Outgrowing Manual Processes
You've been managing purchase orders via email, building shipping documents by hand, and hoping nothing falls through the cracks. It worked when you had five accounts. It won't work at fifty.
Organizations with Existing EDI That's Failing
You already have an EDI system—or you're paying a provider—but errors keep happening, chargebacks keep coming, and nobody seems able to explain why. You need someone who actually understands EDI at the transaction level, not just at the sales pitch level.
Common Challenges We Solve
"We Keep Getting Chargebacks and We Don't Know Why"
This is the one that burns. You shipped the product. It arrived on time. The quality was fine. But a month later, there's a deduction on your payment—$500, $2,000, sometimes more—and the explanation is a cryptic code that points to an ASN error you didn't even know you made. Maybe the SSCC-18 on your label didn't match the MAN segment in your 856. Maybe your hierarchical level structure was SOPI when the retailer required SOTPI. Maybe your ASN arrived after the shipment instead of before it. Whatever the reason, you're writing checks for mistakes that should never have happened.
We eliminate these chargebacks by getting the EDI right at the source. We audit your current ASN generation process, map it against every trading partner's specific requirements, and rebuild it so the data matches—every time. Label to document. Document to shipment. Shipment to receipt. When your ASN is clean, chargebacks don't just decrease—they disappear.
"We Just Got a Major Retail Account and They Require EDI—We Don't Even Know Where to Start"
Congratulations on the account. Now the hard part: your new trading partner just sent you a 200-page implementation guide full of segment identifiers, qualifier codes, and hierarchical loop structures. They expect full EDI compliance—856 ASNs, 810 invoices, GS1-128 labels, AS2 connectivity—and they expect it in weeks, not months. Your team is great at making products. This isn't that.
We've onboarded suppliers to the most demanding trading partners in the country. We take that implementation guide—the one that made your ops manager's eyes glaze over—and we turn it into a working system. We configure your EDI, set up your communication protocols, build your label templates, run your testing, and get you through trading partner validation. By the time your first shipment rolls out, your EDI is indistinguishable from a company that's been doing this for twenty years.
"Our EDI Provider Is a Black Box—We Pay the Bill and Pray"
You signed up with a managed EDI service because you didn't want to deal with the complexity. Fair enough. But now you're paying monthly fees for a system you don't understand, can't see into, and can't troubleshoot when things go wrong. When an 824 rejection comes back from Walmart, you open a ticket and wait. When a new trading partner needs onboarding, it takes weeks and costs extra. When your invoice doesn't match the PO, nobody can tell you which side has the error.
We don't operate like that. When we manage your EDI, you get visibility. You get explanations. You get a team that understands not just the EDI specifications but your business—your products, your shipping processes, your trading partners, and the specific ways those things interact. When an error occurs, we don't just fix it; we tell you what happened, why it happened, and what we've changed to prevent it. Your EDI isn't a mystery anymore. It's a system you trust.
"Our ASN Process Is Manual and It's Killing Us"
Someone on your team—maybe the same someone who does everything else—is manually building ASNs in a portal or a spreadsheet, copying purchase order data by hand, calculating carton counts, typing in SSCC numbers, and praying the label they printed matches the document they transmitted. It takes hours. It's error-prone. And when that person is out sick, nobody else knows how to do it.
We automate the entire ASN lifecycle. Purchase order comes in via EDI 850, our system parses it, generates the ASN with the correct hierarchical structure for that specific trading partner, creates the GS1-128 labels with validated SSCC-18 barcodes, and transmits the 856—all without a human being touching it. Your team goes from spending hours on ASN creation to spending minutes reviewing what the system already built. Errors drop. Speed increases. And your operation doesn't depend on any single person's institutional knowledge.
"Every Trading Partner Wants Something Different and We Can't Keep Up"
ALDI wants their ASN structured one way. KeHE wants it another. Walmart has their own set of requirements that seem to change every quarter. WinCo Foods has specifications that don't match anyone else's. And that regional chain you just signed? They use a VAN you've never heard of and require fields nobody else does.
This is where EDI gets genuinely hard—and where most providers fall short. They give you a one-size-fits-all template and hope it's close enough. It's never close enough. We build trading-partner-specific configurations for every relationship. Each partner gets their own mapping, their own validation rules, their own label format, and their own communication protocol. We maintain those configurations as requirements change, so when Walmart updates their ASN spec—and they will—your system is updated before your next shipment goes out.
"We're Shipping Product but Our Systems Don't Talk to Each Other"
Your ERP knows what was ordered. Your warehouse knows what was picked and packed. Your shipping system knows what's on the truck. But none of those systems share information automatically, so your EDI documents are assembled by hand from three different data sources—and the gaps between them are where errors breed. A quantity discrepancy here. A wrong UPC there. A label that says 48 cases when the pallet has 36.
We integrate your EDI directly into your existing systems—ERP, WMS, shipping, wherever the data lives. When a purchase order arrives, it flows into your operations. When product ships, the ASN is generated from actual warehouse data, not someone's typed approximation of it. The label matches the ASN, the ASN matches the shipment, and the shipment matches the PO. One connected flow, zero manual stitching.
Why Choose Straughn AI for EDI & ASN Solutions
We Don't Just Transmit Documents—We Understand Them
A lot of EDI providers are really just transmission services. They move files from point A to point B and call it a day. When an error occurs—and in EDI, errors aren't a matter of if but when—they point you to a log file and shrug. We operate at a completely different level. We understand the data inside those documents: what the segments mean, why the qualifiers matter, how the hierarchical loops relate to physical shipments, and what happens when any piece of that puzzle is out of place. When a retailer rejects your 856, we don't just see the rejection—we see the specific mismatch between your BSN segment and their purchase order, the SSCC that doesn't validate against GS1 standards, or the date-time reference that arrived in the wrong format. That depth is the difference between an EDI system that works and an EDI relationship that thrives.
30 Years of Solving the Problems Others Can't
We've been building business technology since 1995. We didn't come to EDI from a SaaS template—we came from decades of integrating systems that weren't designed to talk to each other, for businesses where failure wasn't an option. We've built ASN generation systems for beverage distributors managing hundreds of SKUs across dozens of retail accounts. We've onboarded suppliers to Walmart's EDI ecosystem—including the notoriously unforgiving ASN compliance requirements that result in fines for every error. We've untangled legacy EDI implementations where nobody who set up the original system still works at the company, and the documentation is a folder of printed emails from 2009. That depth of experience means we don't guess. We know. We know why your 824 rejection happened, we know what your trading partner actually needs versus what their implementation guide says, and we know the forty edge cases that trip up everyone who's doing this for the first time.
We Build EDI Around How Your Business Actually Ships
Your warehouse doesn't operate like a textbook, and your EDI shouldn't assume it does. We learn your actual processes—how orders are received, how product is picked and staged, how pallets are built, how labels are applied, and how trucks are loaded—and we design your EDI workflows to match that reality. If your warehouse builds mixed pallets, we build ASNs with the correct hierarchical structure for mixed pallets. If your shipping process generates labels at pack-out, we trigger ASN generation at pack-out. If you ship LTL and full truckload from different facilities, we handle each facility's requirements independently. This isn't about forcing your operations into an EDI template. It's about wrapping EDI around your operations so seamlessly that your team barely notices it's there.
We Stay—Because EDI Is Never "Done"
EDI isn't a project with a start date and an end date. It's an ongoing operation. Trading partners change their requirements. New accounts require new configurations. Transaction volumes grow. Retailers update their compliance programs. The VAN changes their API. A new version of your ERP changes how data exports. Every one of these events needs attention, expertise, and someone who picks up the phone. We don't disappear after implementation. We monitor your EDI transactions, catch errors before they become chargebacks, update configurations when trading partners change their specs, and onboard new partners as your business grows. We're not a vendor you call when something's broken. We're a partner who makes sure it doesn't break in the first place.
Why We Do EDI
We do this because we've watched it happen too many times: a supplier who built something incredible—a product people actually want—lands a major retail account, and within six months they're drowning. Not because their product failed. Not because their team wasn't dedicated. Because nobody told them that the invisible technology layer between their warehouse and the retailer's receiving dock would be the hardest part of the entire relationship.
We've taken the call from the operations manager who just received a $14,000 chargeback from a retailer—not because anything was wrong with the shipment, but because the ASN had a formatting error in one segment that nobody caught. We've sat with the business owner who lost a trading partner—a relationship they'd spent two years building—because their EDI provider couldn't onboard correctly, and the compliance failures piled up until the retailer walked away. We've helped the family-run food company whose entire EDI process depended on one person—and when that person left, the shipments stopped, the chargebacks started, and the panic set in.
Those moments are why we do this.
Because a craft beverage company in Florida shouldn't lose shelf space at a national retailer over a barcode mismatch. Because a growing food brand in Colorado shouldn't have to choose between landing new accounts and actually being able to service them. Because no business should hemorrhage money in chargebacks for technical errors that are entirely preventable.
EDI isn't glamorous. Nobody starts a company dreaming about ANSI X12 transaction sets and hierarchical loop structures. But EDI is the connective tissue of modern retail—the infrastructure that determines whether your product makes it from your dock to the shelf, or ends up as a line item on a chargeback report. When it works, nobody notices. When it doesn't, everybody pays.
We make sure it works. Not just adequately—flawlessly. Not just today—for as long as you're growing. Because your product deserves to be on that shelf, and the technology between here and there shouldn't be what stops it. That's not a service offering. That's a commitment. And we take it personally.
Ready to Fix Your Supply Chain Communication?
Let's discuss how EDI and ASN solutions can eliminate chargebacks, automate your shipping documents, and keep your trading partners happy.