Global Standards

To help facilitate trade and eliminate redundant business processes, EDI standards were created to govern the contents and format of electronic documents companies send and receive. These standards create a framework of rules that enable computer systems to translate, validate and interpret the electronic business documents  in a "non-proprietary", interoperable way.  An EDI standard defines business documents, such as purchase orders and invoices, and the data residing in the documents.  There are many versions of EDI standards available for businesses to utilize.  Some of the most prominent standards supported by TIE are ANSI X12 and UN/EDIFACT.

ANSI X12, sanctioned by the American National Standards Institute, is currently thepredominant standard in North America . Some variants to this standard, such as VICS and AIAG, do not modify the base standards but have created and defined subsets of the standard for a specific industry. In the past, other standards such as WINS and TDCC have been incorporated into the ANSI X12 standard. UCS is a standard primarily used by the Grocery Industry in North America . UCS is actually ANSI X12 with extra documents defined for the industry.

UN/EDIFACT is sanctioned by the United Nations. Its name is an acronym for United Nations Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce, and Transport. UN/EDIFACT is an extensive set of business standards utilized in international trade.  Because of its governance by UN/CEFACT, it is a true global standard that accounts for differences in how business is transacted in diverse countries and markets.

Other standards supported by TIE include: 

• Tradacoms
• GENCOD
• ODETTE
• VDA
• GS1
• 1SYNC
• Oasis
• EPC
• Global
• ASCx12
• UNCFACT
• XBRL
• SEMASYS
• Seamless
• W3C

To take advantage of EDI, business partners (or trading partners) must agree on a standard that will be used for exchanging documents.  For example, a business partner might define their Purchase Order as an ANSI X12 850 (EDI Purchase Order), Version 5010.  ANSI X12 is the type of EDI, 850 is the EDI business document number, and Version 5010 is the standard edition that the transaction set is based on.   EDI Standards are large by nature to give businesses the utmost in flexibility to define the information to be exchanged and most companies only utilize a subset of this information.