What is EDI Compliance

Many of the retailers like Amazon,Walmart,Home Depot , Fry’s Electronics insist on their vendors to be EDI compliant. You might be wondering what it takes to become EDI compliant without using complex and expensive EDI software.
To become EDI compliant, there are only two or three steps needed

1. Able to send and receive documents electronically
2. Able to read and write documents in EDI format.

Sending and Receiving EDI Documents

Everyone is aware of sending and receiving documents through email. You simply write the receivers email, attach the documents as file and send it. But in EDI world, email is not a tool for sending and receiving documents.

The other methods used for sending and receiving EDI documents are

1. FTP
2. SFTP
3. AS2
4. HTTP/HTTPS

All these methods do one thing in common. Connect to another computer and read/write EDI documents. So you will need to be familiar with one of these tools to be able to send and receive documents. Most of the time, the trading partners (customer,supplier,warehouse) will tell how they can send and receive EDI documents. For example Amazon EDI supports either SFTP or AS2 method only.

Once you are ready to send and receive documents electronically using one of the above methods, the next step is to see how to read/write the EDI documents.

Read/Write EDI documents

To read and write EDI documents, we need an EDI translator. An EDI translator is a software tool that will understand EDI format and convert to or from any other format. For example, if you have the purchase order data in a Microsoft Excel file, this translator can convert it into a EDI document. Similarly, it can read the EDI document and convert to a Microsoft Excel file. If you are using an Accounting system like QuickBooks and invoicing your customer, the EDI software should read the invoice data, convert into EDI format and automatically send to the customer. Similarly when your customer send a purchase order, the EDI software will read it and post to the Accounting system like QuickBooks as Sales orders.

You can become EDI compliant , contact TPSynergy for details.