EDI-Electronic data Interchange

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) refers to the structured transmission of data between organizations by electronic means. It is a document protocol used in B2B.We will be discussing one of the document protocol to get an idea about the structure of the message used in EDI.

Trading partners can use any method for the transmission of documents.In the past the most common method was value added network (VAN).VAlue added method is one of the oldest method of exhanging document.However this has lot of limitations like a separate network is required for the same,it was too expensive,platform and software specific so it was replaced by new exhanges like AS1,AS2,AS3.These are basically internet transmission and are of very low cost comparsion to VAN.AS2 is done over http.

ADvantage of EDI

1>It is widely adapted.
2>STructured Flat file.
3>It address complex use cases in B2B.
4>Manage huge volume of transactions.

EDI has two standard to exchange document over internet.They are

EDI-EdiFACT and EDI-X12

We will come in to this later.

EDI document contains three groups

1.Interchange
2.Group and
3.Transaction

Interchange and group together form the envelop for the document.

Group is an optional field.
Interchange can be directly combined to transaction.Interchange and transactions are mandatory fields.

Each interchange will have a header and a trailer field.

Similarly each group and transaction will have a header and trailer field.

Interchange header in EDI-X12 is ISA
Interchange trailer in EDI-X12 is IEA


Group header in EDI-X12 is GS
Group Trailer in EDI-X12 is GE


Transaction header in EDI-X12 is ST
Transaction Trailer in EDI-X12 is SE


So in general an EDI-X12 document will have following structure


ISA
GS
ST
SE
GE
IEA


Within one ISA/IEA we can have multiple groups and within one group we can have multiple transactions.

The same concept is used in EDIFACT also

However the header and trailer changes in this case.

Interchange header in EDIFACT is UNB
Interchange trailer in EDIFACT is UNZ

Group Header is UNG
Group trailer is UNE

Transaction header is UNH
Transaction trailer is UNT

The actual data/payload comes in between the transaction header and transaction trailer.


So for EDIFACT the basic structure of document will be

UNB
UNG
UNH
UNT
UNE
UNZ

We can create the Document using Spec builder.

YOu can get more idea on EDI by going through an excellent presentation which you can download from

https://bite1.wordpress.com/