What is EDI?

EDI, or Electronic Data Interchange, simply put is a standard for communicating data between two systems electronically. Most commonly this includes the ANSI X12 standard which most bix box retailers use, however it also encompasses EDIFACT which is the european standard. EDI first became prominent in the business world in the early 1980's. As computers became more and more prominent in the work place, the ability to send and receive business documents without manual data entry became a reality to even the smallest startup.

EDI Standards

I often have to explain that even though there are EDI standards, no one sends the same format. It is much like the English language, we are all picking words from the dictionary, but you can structure even your most basic paragraph in thousands of ways. One of the few things that should not change is the envelope information - ISA, GS, GE, and IEA lines. Contained within the envelope information are such things as Sender/Receiver IDs, Interchange Control Numbers, Group Control Numbers, Date and Time Stamps, EDI Version, etc. These lines are also used by translators to determine the control characters that will be used for the rest of the document including the segment terminator (at the end of the ISA), element delimiter (character seperating fields), and sub-element delimiter (in case an element needs to be broken into sub sets).

EDI Translators

A translator is the software used to parse EDI documents. These often have the libraries loaded for each version of EDI you are trying to exchange which will control all the specified element lengths, data types, control numbers, and other EDI format related checks. Generally, translators do not perform any checks on the actual data that is sent and received - such as checking that the UPC numbers are valid or that terms information is correct. The purpose of the translator is to simply make sure that all required elements are present, and if they are, grab all the information from the trading partners format and place it into a standard document so the company can then perform all the data checks.