We started this blog to bring you all the fun and excitement from the world of data mapping…
We work for a company specialising in the integration of businesses with their trading partners, via automatic exchange of electronic business documents between their systems.
Way back, this was mainly achieved via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and was always driven by large organisations, such as Retailers, Car Manufacturers etc. They would “request” (force) their suppliers to receive orders and send invoices in very tightly specified data formats.
Since the late nineties additional data formats have been devised such as those written in XML, which, it was believed, would answer all the perceived problems of EDI. These perceptions were typically:
Not humanly readable (except for sad geeks like us).
Expensive, EDI was sent via a Value Added Network, for money!
Different Formats
XML is humanly readable isn't it? Well that depends on the standard. For example in SAP IDOC XML, "MENGE" means QTY, and BETRG with a QUALF of 1 means Gross Price…
Of course a different XML standard may use GrossPrice to mean Gross Price!EDI is expensive, but for most of our customers that still use EDI the cost is under 5 pence per document, cheaper than a fax.
EDI has different formats. This is true. In the UK and Europe the main formats are Tradacoms (UK Retail), UN EDIFACT (and variants thereof) and ANSI X12 (mainly used by American Organisations). There are subtle variations (e.g. in EDIFACT there are at least 3 ways to define the supplier of a product, or ODETTE for the Automotive Industry, EDIPAP for the Paper Industry) but most of these are still based on the core of EDIFACT. Currently we know of over 500 XML standards, (not 3). The X in XML stands for extensible. This means organisations can be using a standard of XML (e.g. BASDA XML for their invoices) but 3 different organisations will use that standard in 3 different ways…
We are not sounding the trumpet for any format of data though, be it EDI, XML Flat File, CSV or Excel Spreadsheet. We don't care. Our attitude is that the format of data is irrelevant. The driver for information exchange must be the data requirements of the recipient, and that you can send and receive Electronic Business Documents without the need for human intervention. As long as all the required data are present and the recipient system can understand it all, who cares what the transmitted format is?
That is Electronic Trading.
