A Quick Introduction to EDI Created 3/5/2002 American Electric Power

What Is EDI? Electronic Data Interchange An internationally recognized standard for formatting and exchanging information Simple text files that use delimiter characters to separate the fields and records

ANSI ANSI (American National Standards Institute) continues to define and revise the standards and versions which valid EDI data must conform to…

An example of raw EDI data ISA*00* *00* *01* *01* *020124*0650*U*00401* *1*P*~ GS*IN* * * *0650*590*X* ST*810* BIG* *367498**PX **00*DI N1*RE*Airgas-Mid America*1* N3*PO BOX 1117 N4*Bowling Green*KY* ITD*08**0**0**30*00**00**Net 30 Days IT1*001*24*CF* ************VP*AC 5 M02 PID*F****ACETYLENE SIZE 5 TDS*97749*00*00*00 CAD*****OUR TRUCK;Y SAC*C*C040***850*******06 SE*12* GE*1*590 IEA*1*

Envelope Segments ISA GS ST Data SE GE IEA EDI transactions are surrounded by 6 envelope segments. These segments contain important routing information, such as ids, version, and transaction type. ISA/IEA – Interchange Envelope Contains an entire transmission GS/GE – Group Envelope Contains one group of similar transactions (e.g., multiple purchase orders) ST/SE – Transaction Set Envelope Contains data that describes one single transaction (e.g., one pay order)

Reading a segment of data BIG* *367498**PX **00*DI Segment IdentiferFirst few characters of each segment BIG Element DelimiterSeparates each field in a segment * Empty FieldField in which no data was sent; results in an error when that field is required ** QualifierOften a two or three digit code that is meant to describe another field DI Other key pieces of information found in this specific example are purchase order number, invoice number, and invoice date.