EDI pages

What is EDI?

The current definition of EDI
    Standardized changing of structured data in electronic way between two or more computer applications. EDI is mainly an electronically management standard and not a technological standard for computer data handling. As EDI represents a communication between applications, there are communication applications and protocols connecting to EDI in different communication levels.

    The most important force of EDI is the requirement for standard handling of the electronic documents and it comes from commercial, producing and service provider areas. Big companies are competitively depending on their availability size on the market. Their availability is very optimized if their data management is an automatically, which could be made only on electronic way, and it represents an increasing request for standardized data handling. Big companies need EDI connections to medium and small enterprises (third parties, transporters) to banks, insurance companies and to other customers and services of the financial area. Those big companies, which use the EDI connections, expect to execute their transactions with their partners and suppliers (orders, verifications and invoices) via EDI. This affects the banks too. Because of the international transactions the duty offices needs to know to handle the EDI messages in Europe (ex. transit system).

   EDI allows an automatic handling of the received information in the computer's application without retyping or any other external intervention. This is the reason why become EDI one of the most efficient way to manage and monitories business transactions. Through mechanization of the existing management process, EDI prepares the electronic version of document in circulation data. EDI uses such structure which is recognizable by both sender and receiver management applications. The sender's application creates automatically the structured document with an EDI converter so the receiver's application can handle it automatically. EDI converter makes converting document format.
 

Where should you use EDI?

    The EDI should be used generally in case of frequently sending big amount of critical data in standardized format between two or more users.

   The standardized format is important when there are more than two users of the critical data and the users have different operational systems.

   The secured data management is important when follow up electronic document delivery and conversion, and when archiving and encrypting the habit of the documents format.

   The standardized and secured formation of the EDI system enables the increasing of the system users. This is why is worthwhile to use EDI where are many users and where could growth substantially the community.

   Other characteristic of the EDI application environment is the automatic and mass document management and processing. One of the biggest advantages of the EDI is the capacity in automatic document management

   The frequently data transfers are another characteristic of EDI using environments. There is a regular data adaptation connected to regular data exchange in generally at least one side. It requires automation at data exchange process for the effective adaptation.
 

The UN/EDIFACT standard

    In EDI there are included around 30 years of international standardizing work, this why it is so consistent in it's value. In 1986 the Economical Committee of UN and the American National Standardizing Institute (ANSI) created a research team called X12 United Nations Joint EDI Group (UN/JEDI). This group made the new globalized EDI standard, in 1987 engendered the United Nations Electronic Data for Administration, Commerce and Transport, the UN/EDIFACT was funded.

    In 1987 Septembers the standard was recognized as ISO 9735 standard. In the next year the UN European Economical Community and the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) funded the Trade Electronic Interchange Systems (TEDIS) organization, which scope was to help EDI application in economic relations and to spread the UN/EDIFACT standard.

   The UN/EDIFACT is the result of an international EDI standard creation effort. The different areas of the world use different local EDI standards, but the economy grew over the national and state limits. All of this slowly made the other standard's users to apply the common EDI language. The UN/EDIFACT is a very important step to a common EDI data transfer language.

   The UN/EDIFACT is electronic description of more than 175 business documents. These documents enfold a large variety of business transactions.
 

EDI standards and directories

http://www.unece.org/trade/untdid/
http://www.disa.org