Hi Praveen,
ALE and EDI look very similar in SAP as they use the same underlying technology -> Idocs.
They are designed, however, to achieve slightly different things.
<b>EDI</b> (Electronic Data Interchange) is not a SAP initiative, it is a method for business partners to exchange business transactions electronically. For example sending a purchase order from your system which automatically creates a sales order on your suppliers system.
SAP enabled EDI in early releases of R/3 by creating the Idoc subsystem. Thus, when you create a sales order, you can configure SAP to send a sales order Idoc which is then often transformed via a 3rd party tool into a standard EDI message format (such as EDIFACT).
<b>ALE</b> (Application Link Enabling), however, is focussed on integrating disparate systems together. This may be R/3 <-> R/3 or R/3 <-> Other System. An example might be when you have an external warehouse management system, you need to send it master data (materials, etc.) and also transactional data (deliveries, etc.) and it needs to send data back to R/3 (material movements, etc.). This is managed by exchanging Idocs between the two systems, again often transformed using a 3rd party translation tool.
Thus, the underlying Idoc infrastructure between the two tools is the same, but the business functionality they implement is quite different. This means there are some different configuration options between the two. For ALE you need to establish a Distribution model via the IMG to say which Idocs go in which direction (and a lot of other stuff), for EDI, however, this is done directly within customising for SD and MM.
I hope that helps to answer your question, please come back with something specific if not.
Cheers,
Brad
Bluesky
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.