EDIfact: Standard for Electronic Data Interchange for administration, commerce and transport

EDIfact stands for Electronic Data Interchange for administration, commerce and transport. It is an international and cross-industry standard that was developed for the electronic exchange of business data. The special feature: The standard was first launched and published in 1986 by the United Nations (UN) and other interest groups. It is protected as ISO standard 9735 and is still maintained today by a UN group – one reason why it is also known as UN/EDIfact.

Basically, EDI (via SSCC) describes the automatic creation of documents, including the sending and receiving of digitized messages (at that time mail and fax). EDI, together with the “fact” application areas, is a standard that can map all electronic processing of modern business transactions. This includes, for example, communication between companies, industries and countries – independent of hardware and software. To date, there are a total of 200 message types that define the structure of different messages. Each individual message type relates to a specific business process. Examples include the message types INVOIC for invoices or ORDERS for purchase orders.

Important: As not all industry-specific requirements could be implemented, individual industries developed so-called EDIfact subsets. They are EDIfact-compliant and identical in terms of syntax and message format – so they can be combined with each other without any problems.

Challenges with EDIfact

Nevertheless, many companies still use different EDI formats (third-party systems), which make it impossible or difficult to implement a standard syntax. However, message standards must be cross-industry so that they can be used in the various sectors of the economy – otherwise new business areas and partners can be difficult to integrate into the existing legacy system. More than 300,000 companies are said to already use EDIfact; and in future, a working group will continue to focus on the industry-neutral and manufacturer-independent standard.

You can find more information under Communication in the information system

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