Every partner connected. Without your partners changing a thing.
Your partners keep sending emails and PDFs — Syntact reads purchase orders, order confirmations, delivery notes and invoices, validates them against your master data and writes structured data into your ERP. Like EDI. Just without an EDI project per partner.
"Dear team, please find attached our purchase order 4711: 120 × art. 88-4402, delivery in week 32, ship to plant 2. Kind regards, Huber Metal Works Ltd."
EDI covers your biggest partners. Your team covers the rest — by hand.
Between "properly connected via EDIFACT" and "someone types it in" there is nothing in most companies. That's exactly the gap where hours disappear every day — in order processing, purchasing and accounting.
Your biggest partners are properly connected — EDIFACT, AS2, fully automatic. But the long tail of 50 to 500 smaller partners still sends purchase orders, order confirmations, delivery notes and invoices as emails with PDFs. And your team keys them in.
Mapping workshops, test messages, AS2 certificates, VAN fees: a classic onboarding quickly costs thousands of euros per partner and drags on for months. For a partner sending three orders a month, it never pays off — so it never happens.
Portals shift the work to the partner: remember a login, fill in a form, maintain data twice. Small partners simply don't do it — they keep sending their email. You end up running a portal nobody uses, and typing everything in anyway.
Every day your team transfers documents into the ERP by hand — line items, article numbers, dates, prices. With every transposed digit, an error travels into production, warehouse or accounting. And with every new partner, the pile grows.
The long tail isn't forgotten. It's priced in.
Every classic path to connecting small partners fails on the same math: project cost per partner versus a handful of documents per month. So the retyping stays — a silent, permanent cost center nobody questions anymore.
Aligning mappings, running test messages, exchanging certificates — for a partner who sends three orders a month. The project gets costed correctly, and therefore never starts.
The WebEDI portal is set up, the invitations are sent — and the orders keep arriving by email. If you push the work onto the partner, you get it back unsolved.
Purchase order, order confirmation, delivery note, invoice: four document types per partner, each in a different layout. Your team transfers them by hand, day after day — across sales, purchasing and accounting.
120 units become 210, article 88-4402 becomes 88-4402-A: without validation against master data, the error only surfaces when the wrong goods arrive at receiving — or the invoice doesn't match.
What does the long tail cost you — the one nobody connects?
Conservative math: 250 working days per year, pure transfer time only. Error costs and delays aren't included — and neither is the alternative of connecting every partner via classic EDI for thousands of euros each.
Structured data without structured senders.
Classic EDI requires the partner to send structured data. Syntact flips that: the structure is created on your side — from the emails and PDFs that already arrive today.
Purchase order as PDF, order confirmation as email, delivery note as scan: Syntact monitors your mailboxes and accepts documents exactly as your partners send them today. No portal, no format mandate, no call to the partner.
The AI extracts partner, line items, article numbers, quantities, prices and dates — structured like a parsed ORDERS, DESADV or INVOIC. Every value is checked against your master data: articles, prices, partner records. Anything unclear gets flagged, not guessed.
The document lands as a draft in your ERP or TMS — right next to the original PDF. Your team reviews flagged fields in the review queue and approves. Minutes of typing become seconds of control — for every partner, from their very first document.
Approval stays with your team: no document enters the ERP unchecked. The AI proposes — humans decide, documented in the audit log.
EDI demands a format. Syntact understands the document.
Mapping projects, WebEDI portals and OCR templates share the same blind spot: they only work if the sender plays along. The difference is who does the work — your partner, or the AI.
No portal login, no format mandate, no re-education project: your partners keep sending emails and PDFs exactly as they do today. The connection happens entirely on your side — the partner doesn't even notice it.
Purchase order, order confirmation, delivery note, invoice: the same mechanism handles the entire document flow with a partner — not just the one message type that would have justified a mapping project.
Structured doesn't mean unchecked: article numbers, prices, units of measure and partner data are matched against your master data — just like a properly mapped EDI message. Deviations get flagged before they reach the ERP.
Your EDIFACT connections to top partners stay exactly as they are — including your EDI service provider. Syntact takes over the rest: the 50 to 500 partners for whom classic EDI never made economic sense.
No mapping workshop, no test messages, no project cost per partner: a new partner works from their very first document — the AI understands the content instead of expecting a format. Partner number one hundred costs no more than partner number one.
No document enters the ERP unchecked: the AI proposes, flags deviations and puts the case in front of your team for approval — with the original right beside it. Humans decide, documented in the audit log.
"But we already have EDI." Exactly. That's the point.
Good — keep it. EDI is the right solution for your top partners, and Syntact changes nothing about that. The question is: what about the other 200? This page is written precisely for the long tail, where a mapping project per partner will never pay off.
Because portals shift the work to the partner: login, form, double data entry. Small partners won't play along — adoption dies, and you keep typing. Syntact demands exactly zero behavior change from your partner: they send their email, you get structured data.
They stay. Regulated e-invoicing channels like Peppol keep running exactly as required. Syntact covers everything that arrives alongside them: purchase orders, order confirmations, delivery notes — and the invoices that still land in the inbox as PDFs anyway.
The same mechanism — for every document that gets retyped today.
Your ERP stays. Your EDI stays. Syntact fills the gap.
Documents come from the inbox, reviewed drafts land in your ERP or TMS — via API or import format, mapped to your fields. No system change, no parallel operation, no change to existing EDI connections.
Missing connectors are built for free — contractually guaranteed. Compatible with anything that has an API or an import format for documents.
We carry the risk. You keep the control.
A pilot with 10 of your real non-EDI partners, on your real documents, with your team — on terms where doing nothing is the most expensive option.
If your 10 pilot partners aren't running in production after 90 days, we keep working for free until they are.
You pay no platform license while the pilot isn't productive. The risk sits with us.
Mailbox monitoring, master-data matching, field mapping to your ERP and your review workflow — set up for you, not sold to you.
90 days of direct access to the person building your use case — no ticket system, no call center.
If the pilot doesn't reach production, you pay only half the implementation.
Missing an interface to your ERP or TMS? We build it for free — contractually guaranteed. In classic EDI, connectivity is the cost block that kills every partner project. Here it's a guaranteed part of the pilot — not the invoice afterwards.
The mechanism is already running — with real customers, on real data.
Syntact reads documents and writes structured data straight into the target system — the same mechanism that turns your partner emails into reviewed ERP documents. Syntact is the AI foundation platform for companies: one foundation for every use case, operated in the EU, all the way to on-premises.
- Purchase orders, delivery notes, invoices and master data in one semantic data layer
- Permissions & audit log on every level
- After partner connectivity: invoice checking, order entry, knowledge assistant — same platform
"With Syntact, we successfully unified all our product, pricing, and logistics data and achieved ROI from the very first use case."
30 minutes. Your partner documents. A reviewed document in the ERP.
No slide deck: bring five to ten real partner documents — ideally the awkward ones with odd formats and missing article numbers. We'll show you how they become structured ERP documents. On your documents, not on our demo data set.
- Feasibility on your document inflowA live demo based on your emails and PDFs — format chaos included.
- A concrete 90-day pilot plan10 partners, a timeline, and what we need from your IT (little).
- Pricing, in black and whitePlatform, implementation, guarantees — compared to EDI project costs.
- Engineers instead of salesYou talk to the solutions architect who will build the pilot.
- What does “EDI alternative” mean — concretely?
- Syntact reads the documents your non-EDI partners already send today — purchase orders, order confirmations, delivery notes and invoices as emails and PDFs —, extracts structured data at EDI level, validates it against your master data and creates it as a draft in your ERP or TMS. Your team reviews and approves instead of retyping. Your partners change nothing about their behavior.
- We already run EDI with our biggest partners — do we still need this?
- Yes, because that's exactly what it's built for: your EDIFACT connections to top partners stay untouched, including the relationship with your EDI provider. Syntact takes over the long tail — the 50 to 500 partners where a mapping project per partner never paid off, and whose documents have therefore been keyed into the ERP by hand until today.
- Why not a WebEDI portal for the small partners?
- WebEDI shifts the work to the partner: they're supposed to log in and type their data into your form. In practice, small partners don't do it — they keep sending their email, and your team enters everything twice. Syntact flips this around: the partner changes nothing, the structuring happens on your side. Adoption stops being a risk because it stops being a question.
- How is this different from EDI clearing or providers like Procuros?
- Clearing centers and modern EDI networks convert between structured formats — they assume the partner sends structured data in the first place, or is willing to connect. Syntact starts one level earlier: with the partners who deliver no format at all, just emails and PDFs. The AI creates the structure from the document itself — which is why a partner works from day one without having to participate. Both can run side by side.
- Our partners' documents are chaotic — everyone sends something different. Does it still work?
- That's exactly what Syntact is built for. The AI understands the content instead of expecting a fixed layout: the clean purchase order with a line-item table as well as the informal three-line email. There's no template training per partner — partner number 300 with their own format works from their very first document.
- Our ERP is heavily customized — can you still connect it?
- Yes. Syntact writes into your system via API or import format, with field mapping to your structures — including customized SAP, proALPHA or Business Central installations. If a connector is missing, we build it for free, contractually guaranteed. What we need for that, we clarify in the first call with your IT.
- What's the error rate — and who's liable if something wrong lands in the ERP?
- No document enters the ERP unchecked: every value is validated against your master data, deviations and uncertain fields are flagged and presented to your team in the review queue — with the original right beside them. Approval stays with humans, and every decision is documented in the audit log. That's the same control standard you expect from tested EDI connections — just without the mapping project in front of it.
- What about Peppol and e-invoicing mandates?
- Regulated e-invoicing channels remain untouched: whatever must flow through Peppol or national e-invoicing formats keeps flowing there. Syntact covers the rest — purchase orders, order confirmations, delivery notes, and the many invoices that still arrive as PDFs in the inbox despite all regulation.
- Our IT has no capacity for yet another project — what do you need from us?
- Little: access to the affected mailboxes, an ERP interface or import format, and one contact person for the field mapping. Everything is set up by our solutions architect — not by your team on the side. The pilot is deliberately scoped to run alongside your IT's day-to-day business, not instead of it.
- Our head of IT has to sign this off — what do they get from us?
- Everything they need for the assessment: architecture and interface documentation, an access-control and audit concept, and the GDPR documentation. Syntact is operated GDPR-compliant in the EU — on request in your own cloud or on-premises. Your partner and document data stays within your control, and access follows your permission model.
- What does it cost — compared to classic EDI?
- The platform starts at €800 per month — and the license only starts once you're in production. For comparison: a classic EDI onboarding costs several thousand euros per partner, plus recurring fees. With Syntact there are no project costs per partner — the tenth, fiftieth and two-hundredth partner are covered by the same mechanism. In the demo call, we'll run the business case with your numbers.
Your partners will never do EDI. They don't have to.
Structured data from every partner — from their first document, without a mapping project, without portal mandates. Your EDI stays. The retyping goes.