The Move To Standardised EDI

The solution was EDI, Electronic Data Interchange, a standard method of transferring commercial information between computers.

The Message

EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) files contain information, in one of many possible formats, pertaining to commercial documents. For example, a paper invoice will always contain certain information whatever the company or country of origin. It will contain the originating and receiving company’s information such as addresses, telephone numbers, contacts, etc. It will then have a section where the items to be invoiced are laid out in a formatted manner, with prices and quantities, and finally it will have a totals section.

All this information may be contained within an EDI file of a pre-defined format, so that whoever receives the file will be able to understand it and automatically pass this information into their own in-house systems, irrespective of the type of computer or the systems that they are running.

The Standards Bodies

A number of different standards bodies were created to define both methods of communications and the layout of standard trading documents, so that simple and cost effective electronic trading could take place. The main document standards with which we will be concerned are EDIFACT, Tradacoms and ANSI X12, but before going into detail about the standards themselves, here is a short background to the development of the UK documents standards bodies.

The earliest development of standards, usually for particular sectors of industry, was carried out in the late 1970’s under the auspices of the EAN. EAN is the International Article Numbering Organisation dealing with EDI standards. It acts as an umbrella group for the various national Numbering Organisations. In 1998, as a result of the merger of the Article Number Association (ANA) and the Electronic Commerce Association, the e.centreUK was launched as the EAN Numbering Organisation for the UK. More recently, in February 2005, the e.centreUK has become GS1 UK. This is in line with the global re-launch of EAN International as GS1.

The first UK message standards were published by the ANA in 1982, having been tested and developed since 1979. Over 90% of all UK trade EDI takes place using standards from the ANA, whose members include representatives from manufacturing, distribution, wholesaling, service and retail organisations.

The ANA standards use the two key syntaxes:

• UN/GTDI (General Trade Data Interchange), which forms the basis for TRADACOMS messages;
• UN/EDIFACT (EDI for Administration Commerce and Transport), which is the basis for EANCOM and UK EDIFACT messages.

Further details about message syntax are in the sections that follow.