Liaison Simplifies EDI Trading Partner Management with Athena Community Manager

Liaison launched their Athena Community Manager. Athena Community Manager is a cloud-based, SaaS portal that allows enterprises to easily manage non-integrated EDI trading partners. It does so by enabling enterprises to log in and run reports against suppliers, view stats and create announcements for suppliers. All within a special hub-facing version of Liaison Athena.

A little bit more about Liaison’s Athena Community Manager

Athena is Liaison’s industry-leading, web-based, SaaS EDI application that allows enterprises to easily integrate trading partners who don’t have EDI systems. The application allows partners to enter data into web forms, and compares the data in outgoing EDI documents with the enterprise’s specifications to ensure compliance. With Athena Community Manager, enterprises now have oversight of their trading partners’ activities, opening up real-time communication between hubs and suppliers to minimize downstream errors.

Key features in Athena Community Manager include:

• Community Management: Allows enterprises, or “hubs”, to customize the look and feel of the Athena portal for particular partners. Hubs can set alerts, bulletins and terms; retain data and archive policies; and manage the users who have access to the tool.
• Partner Management: Users have the ability to search, view and filter partners. Enterprises can view specific partner activity, and view partner data and status.
• Form Management: For easy integration, hubs can enroll partners in forms and set form status – including test or production.
• Reporting: Companies have access to reports and key statistics for one or multiple trading partners.

Robert Fox, vice president of application development for Liaison Technologies:

• “In light of the successful adoption of Athena by the trading partner community, we saw an opportunity to further improve partner relations by providing enterprises with visibility into their Athena supplier network,”
• “With this in mind, we created Athena Community Manager to enable the hub to easily communicate with and manage suppliers. By opening up our SaaS-based EDI process to both sides, Liaison is providing a more dynamic, collaborative solution that meets the needs of both the supplier and the hub.”