Current EDI Transmission Options

Prior to the availability of the Internet as a secure means of transporting business transactions, companies hired the services of Value Added Networks (VAN). These VANs managed the communications aspect of the EDI process and generally charged one or both trading partners based on transaction volume. Now that these same transactions can be sent securely at no cost via the Internet, large companies like Wal-Mart are starting to mandate the use of EDI-INT to reduce communications costs for themselves and their trading partners.  Conversion from EDI VAN to EDI-INT requires minimal effort and can produce significant savings by reducing transaction fees.

Today, EDI over the Internet (EDI-INT) is a popular means for Business-to-Business connectivity as more and more companies find the Internet as a less expensive alternative for Computer-to-Computer transaction integration.

As more trading partners use the Internet for transmission, standards have emerged. In 2002, the IETF published RFC 3335, offering a standardized, secure method of transferring EDI data via e-mail. On July 12th, 2005, an IETF working group ratified RFC4130 for MIME-based HTTP EDIINT (aka. AS2) transfers, FTP transfers (aka. AS3).

Current EDI Standards

There are two major sets of EDI standards: the United Nations recommended UN/EDIFACT is the only international standard and is predominant outside of North America; and the US standard ANSI ASC X12 (X12) is predominant in North America. These standards prescribe the formats, character sets, and data elements used in the exchange of business documents and forms. The complete X12 Document List includes all major business documents, including purchase orders (called "ORDERS" in UN/EDIFACT and an "850" in X12) and invoices (called "INVOIC" in UN/EDIFACT and an "810" in X12).

The EDI standard says which pieces of information are mandatory for a particular document, which pieces are optional and give the rules for the structure of the document. The standards are like building codes. Just as two kitchens can be built "to code" but look completely different, two EDI documents can follow the same standard and contain different sets of information. For example a food company may indicate a product's expiration date while a clothing manufacturer would choose to send color and size information.

Specifications

Organizations that send or receive documents to or from each other are referred to as "trading partners" in EDI terminology. The trading partners agree on the specific information to be transmitted and how it should be used. This is done in human readable specifications (also called EDI Implementation Guidelines). While the standards are analogous to building codes, the specifications are analogous to blue prints. (The specification may also be called a mapping but the term mapping is typically reserved for specific machine readable instructions given to the translation software.)

Interpreting Data

EDI translation software provides the interface between internal systems and the EDI format sent/received. See Interpreting Data.