Different EDI Standards | Industry Subsets | UN/Edifact | ANSI X12 | TRADACOMS | ODETTE | Maintaining EDI Standards | Other Issues

Different EDI Standards
EDI incorporates standard layouts for all business documents. However, there are different standards available. The decision as to which standard to adopt is usually determined by what is already in general use within your business sector and by mutual agreement with your trading partner.

There are four main technical standards:

• UN/EDIFACT - the main standard supported by the UN
• ANSI X12 - common in USA, Canada and Australia
• TRADACOMS - predominantly used in the UK
• ODETTE - developed in the UK for the motor industry.

Each standards body publishes definitions of the documents, which may be exchanged electronically. An EDI message represents common business documents and its definition specifies the content and sequence of the data to be included.

Industry Subsets
Due to the vast number of segments with each standard, most industries have an appointed EDI standards body that generates subsets of their chosen EDI standard. These subsets adhere to their parent standard, but remove the conditional segments within each message that are not required.

This is most common for EDIFACT, as it was created to enable electronic trading for all EDI scenarios. Because of this, EDIFACT users are invariably deploying a subset of EDIFACT, for example, EDIFICE is an EDIFACT subset created for the computing, electronics and telecommunications industry.

UN/EDIFACT
The EDIFACT standard (EDI For Administration Commerce and Transport) is the only EDI standard that is truly accepted world-wide. EDIFACT provides standard formats for business documents and incorporates features that meet international requirements.

Whilst EDIFACT messages are designed for business data transactions, they are complex in their structure. It is accepted that national/industry conventions will determine which parts of the total message requirements to use. As a result, the message will be reduced down to size to only contain the information required by that industry. Some different subsets of the EDIFACT format are listed below:

ANSI X12
US standards under the control of ANSI (American National Standards Institute) have developed separately from Europe.

The ANSI X12 committee specified standards for transaction sets, a data element dictionary, and transmission control. Direct comparisons can be found with standards developed in Europe, but the American standards are used differently.

The ANSI X12 standard is used in the USA, Canada and to a degree in Australia. The X12 transaction sets cover a wide range of industry sectors, including administration, education, finance and government:

TRADACOMS
Developed by the ANA (Article Numbering Association) in 1982 for the UK retail industry it is currently the most widely used standard in the UK within this market. It defines standards for 30+ trading documents. Due to the more specific nature of TRADACOMS messages, the standard is not generally broken down into subsets. Some examples are listed below:

ODETTE
The ODETTE standard consists of over thirty messages for deployment in the automotive industry and reflects the industry's use of JIT ("Just in Time") methods. The messages can use either EDIFACT or TRADACOMS service segments.

ODETTE International currently has 6 European members including ODETTE UK, which is managed in association with SMMT (Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders).

Maintaining EDI Standards
All EDI standards bodies issue updates to their EDI Directories. Each EDI directory contains an updated list of EDI messages (document formats) and their structure in terms of the segments and data elements they contain. Each EDI standard will also issue a list of syntax characters that are used in the transmission of EDI data to indicate the way in which the content has been fragmented. For example, EDIFACT will:

• Separate segments with '
• Separate data elements with +
• Separate sub-elements within a composite data element with :

Although these characters will differ between EDI standards, they tend to remain consistent across updates to EDI Directories within an EDI standard.

Other Issues

Directory versions
It is likely that different trading partners within your community will be using different versions of EDI Directories issued by the same EDI standard body. This happens when you may have been approached by a trading partner in 1992 when the current version of TRADACOMS Directory was V8 (issued in 1989) and in 1993 approached by another trading partner wanting to use V9 (issued in 1993). Again, this is not a problem provided your EDI enabler software is capable of supporting different versions of EDI standards.

Directory subsets
It is normal procedure at the time of introducing a new trading relationship, to issue a paper document so that the recipient of the EDI data has a definition of what to expect.

When comparing this document with the appropriate standard message layout within the relevant EDI Directory, it is sometimes necessary to create an individual subset within the EDI Directory to enable a definitive structure of the message specifically to handle this trading partner's utilisation of the message.

Interface file formats
Whilst not directly part of the EDI Directory, it is necessary for the EDI enabler software to be aware of the format of the files into which the outbound EDI data will be translated, and from which outbound EDI data will be constructed.

Message interface
When translating inbound EDI or vice versa, when constructing outbound EDI, the message interface definition needs to be created for the appropriate EDI message within the relevant EDI Directory/Subset. This will instruct the EDI enabler software to pass the content of individual data elements into respective records/fields or tables/columns.