EDI and International Standards for SAP

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) as a tool for paperless inter-company communication and basic instrument for e-commerce is heavily regulated by several international standards.

Unfortunately, it is true for many areas in the industry that an international standard does not mean that everybody uses the same conventions.

Too many organizations play their own game and define standards more or less
compatible with those set by competing organizations.

The main contenders are the national standards organizations and private companies
versus the big international organizations ISO and ANSI.

The private companies being backed up by their country organizations usually fight
for maintaining conventions, which have been often established for many years with
satisfaction.

The American National Standards Organisation ANSI and the international
partner International Standards Organization ISO will usually fight for a solid open
standard to cover the requirements of everybody.

This generally leads to a more or less foul trade-off between pragmatism and
completeness. Tragically the big organizations put themselves in question. Their
publications are not free of charge. The standards are publications which cost a lot
of money. So they mostly remain unread.

Nowadays computing standards have mostly been published and established by
private organizations who made their knowledge accessible free of charge to
everybody. Examples are manifold like PostScript by Adobe, HTML and JavaScript
by Netscape, Java by SUN, SCSI by APPLE, ZIP by PK Systems or MP3 by – who
cares, XML by W3C and EDIFACT by the United Nations Organization UNESCO.

The well-known standards EDIFACT, X.12 and XML have similar characteristics and are
designed like a document description language. Other standards and R/3 IDocs are based on segmented files.

ANSI X.12 is the US standard for EDI and e-commerce. Why is it still the
standard? There are chances that X.12 will be soon replaced by the more flexible
XML, especially with the upcoming boost of e-commerce. ANSI X.12 is a
document description language.

An ANSI X.12 message is made up of segments with fields. The segments have a
segment identifier and the fields are separated by a special separator character, e.g. an asterisk.

BEG*00*NE*123456789**991125**AC~

EDIFACT was originally a European standard. It became popular when chosen by
the UNO for their EDI transactions. EDIFACT is a document description language.
EDIFACT is very similar to ANSI X.12 and differs merely in syntactical details and
the meaning of tags.

XML and the internet page description language HTML are both subsets derived
from the super standard SGML...

The patent and trademark holder of XML describes the
advantages of XML very precisely as follows.

1. XML is a method for putting structured data in a text file.

2. XML looks a bit like HTML but isn't HTML.

3. XML is text, but isn't meant to be read.

4. XML is verbose, but that is not a problem.

5. XML is license-free and platform-independent.

And XML is fully integrated in the world wide web. It can be said briefly: XML
sends the form just as the customer entered the data.

XML

This is an excerpt of an XML EDI message. The difference from all other EDI standards is that the message information is tagged in a way that it can be displayed in human readable form by a browser.

XML differs from the other standards. It is a document markup language like its
sister and subset HTML.

XML defines additional tags to HTML, which are specially designed to mark up
formatted data information.

The advantage is that the XML message has the same information as an EDIFACT
or X.12 message. In addition, it can be displayed in an XML capable web browser .