Minimize Disruption with Your EDI Partners

An analyst from an Italian bank posed a series of questions on initiating his EDI project. He made the initial mistake of believing that using the latest version of a standard is best. Following are my responses.

"I'm starting a project in order to create a mapping from EDIFACT to a
banking XML format.
I read of the different directories (version) of the EDIFACT
standard but what I can't find are the differences and compatibility
issues between the different directories."


ANSWER

You might be putting the cart before the horse.

My 1st step would be to contact some major trading partners to discuss
what version/structure of the targeted transaction they wish to use
& gather the guidelines. Other banks may be willing to share their
guidelines with you.


The standards are so wide, there can be major differences in usage by
trading partners even within the same version.
I would not pull the latest version and necessarily start from there,
but would create my baseline map and guidelines from the
version/structure most commonly used in the trading community-- unless there is a compelling reason to go to a later version. The goal is to limit the disruption to your trading community while meeting your business needs.

"If I create my 1st map using EDIFACT D08B
(the last version), will it be possible to map also previous EDIFACT
versions (ie, do the standards have backward compatibility)?

ANSWER

No you cannot assume that the standards are backward compatible.
Sometime they are, but sometime they are not.

"Which is the de facto standard version? I saw lot of material on the
D96A... Why?"


ANSWER

In the electronics and high tech industry, I most commonly see D97.A. The reason you see many guidelines at this release or around this release is that many of the
standards were mature (ie contained nearly everything a business would
need), and there was a big push in the 90's for EDI adoption. Most
businesses have no reason to spend the time and $$ to upgrade to the latest version
once they have a stable and reliable EDI /B2B system in place. In the
US, many companies use version 4010 because it was the 1st one to
address Y2K & there was a big push in the late 90's to migrate to this.

One exception is in the US, the HIPAA (health care) transactions have
been in development because of US law.

For more detailed article on implementing EDI/B2B, please read my article Seven Steps for Your Successful B2B Project.