Rapid and accurate exchange of information is critical for effective business transactions between companies. Each new communication technology that evolved was adapted for business purposes. The telegraph, radio, telephone and now the Internet have all been recruited to improve business communication.
The roots of EDI can be traced to the 1948 Berlin Airlift. There was an enormous problem in coordinating the consignments of food and other consumables that were arriving by air from many different origins. The problem's solution lay in creating a standard manifest to replace all the different manifests in different languages and formats.
Around 1960, a number of different businesses in the transportation and retail industries began exploring the application of electronic communication to improve the processing and transfer of business documents to speed up transportation of goods and reduce transportation and administrative costs. This type of operation came to be known as Electronic Document Exchange or EDI. These methods were proprietary and required each company to develop separate systems to deal with each other company with whom they carried out EDI.
Then different industries began to develop standards for electronic business communication and processing within their industries including transportation, pharmaceuticals, groceries, automobiles, and banking. In 1968, a group of railroad companies formed an organization to study the problems with the quality of inter-company exchanges of transportation data and to improve it. This organization was called the Transportation Data Coordinating Committee (TDCC). The TDCC acted to oversee the development of translation rules among four different sets of industry-specific standards and published the first standard in 1975. This improved a great deal of intercompany communication but companies from different industries still could not use EDI to communicate.
The main focus of the TDCC was on the content of the messages rather than the communication method. They developed the concept of the "transaction set" which corresponded to the use of standard paper business forms. Transaction set messages are composed of "data segments" which can be thought of as individual lines of information. Each segment or line contains "data elements" which correspond to data fields.
In 1978, the TDCC was renamed the Electronic Data Interchange Association (EDIA) and chartered by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to work on a national standard for EDI. In 1979, it became the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) for EDI X.12 format development.
In 1984, the UK Department of Customs and Excise in cooperation with the British Simplification of Trade Procedures Board began work on its own electronic document standards called Tradacoms for use in international trade. The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) eventually developed these standards into the General-purpose Trade Data Interchange (GTDI) standards which were eventually adopted by thousands of British exporting organizations.
Problems were created by the international use of two different and mostly incompatible sets of standardized EDI documents. In 1985, The United Nations Joint European and North American working party (UN-JEDI) was created and which began the development of the Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (EDIFACT) document translation standards. In 1986, an EDIFACT standard was released.
ANSI X-12 and UN/EDIFACT were the first major EDI standards and they have co-existed up to the present. Many businesses now use one or both of these EDI standards. There are also industry specific EDI standards such as Uniform Communication Standard (UCS) for food industries, Warehouse Information Network Standard (WINS) for public warehouses, Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) standards in the US, Organization for Data Exchange through Teletransmission in Europe (ODETTE) for the European Automotive industry and others.
EDI is used worldwide from Norway to Alaska, from China to Chile, etc. Its international adoption has brought improvements in such areas as inventory management, transport and distribution, administration and cash management. EDI is undergoing a period of rapid expansion and innovation. It is being combined with new technologies such as the Internet and XML to create a more tight knit and efficient network of major industrial players.
Gamut is proud to be taking a leading role in the latest developments of this important infrastructure by providing the most comprehensive hosted EDI solution available on the market today.