EDI standards explained

The term EDI, or electronic data interchange, is an automated way to exchange business documents such as orders, invoices and shipping notes, without paperwork. Because systems talk directly to each other, they need shared EDI standards to understand the data. Here we explain the main ones.

In the UK, most retail and grocery EDI runs on EDIFACT, often its retail subset EANCOM, with TRADACOMS still used by some long-standing trading partners, GS1 UK numbers for locations and products, and Peppol for NHS and public sector invoicing. Transalis supports all of these on one connection and translates between them, so a supplier does not need to know which standard each partner uses.

The main EDI standards

The right standard matters because it lets the data sent and received be interpreted correctly by both partners' systems. Many standards are in use, and different industries favour different ones.

Which EDI standard is used in the UK?

UK retail EDI began with Tradacoms, introduced in the 1980s for grocery and general retail. Most UK trading has since moved to EDIFACT and its retail subset, EANCOM, though some partners still exchange Tradacoms messages. Many UK suppliers need to support more than one standard at once, because each retailer they trade with may ask for a different format. That is where a managed provider removes the work.

How an EDI document is structured

EDI standards set out the format and make-up of a document, including the order of information and where each value sits. A document includes elements (such as an item number, cost or buyer location). Groups of elements are segments (for example, a full buyer address). The completed document is a transaction set.

For a closer look at the documents themselves, see our guide to EDI transactions.

Four principles govern EDI documents

• Syntax sets the characters used and the order they appear in.
• Codes give shared meanings for details like dates, currencies and country names.
• Message design sets the structure of a message type, such as an invoice or order.
• Identification values set out how each value in a document is identified.

EDI standards and communication protocols

Once the right standard is in place, documents are sent to the trading partner over a communication protocol such as SFTP, AS2, AS4, SMTP or API. The standard is the language; the protocol is the delivery method. Transalis is one of a handful of UK EDI providers certified to the AS4 standard of Peppol (Pan-European Public Procurement Online), the framework that makes different systems interoperable for orders, despatch advice and invoices.

Why Transalis

Transalis lets you exchange documents in any required format, over any EDI protocol, through a single connection to our managed EDI service, removing almost all internal EDI effort. New connections are handled by a dedicated project manager, and our API lets you send and receive data straight from your existing ERP.

Talk to an EDI specialist