EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the exchange of business documents such as orders, despatch advices and invoices between two companies, in standard formats agreed in advance and without manual data entry. EDI is not a single protocol: it is the combination of a document standard and a transport route.
Document standards
The document standard defines the structure, fields and code lists of a message. The main standards in the type libraries of SAP Integration Advisor:
| Standard | Scope | Example messages |
|---|---|---|
| UN/EDIFACT | The United Nations EDI standard for administration, commerce and transport | ORDERS (purchase order), ORDRSP (order response), DESADV (despatch advice), INVOIC (invoice), DELFOR (delivery schedule) |
| ASC X12 | The standard maintained by the Accredited Standards Committee X12 (ANSI ASC X12) | 850 (purchase order), 856 (ship notice), 810 (invoice) |
| VDA | Messages defined by VDA and used in the German automotive industry | VDA 4905 (delivery schedule), VDA 4913 (despatch note) |
| Odette | Messages defined by Odette and used in the European automotive industry | Newer Odette messages are a subset of EDIFACT |
| EANCOM | GS1's subset of UN/EDIFACT; retail, consumer products, transport and logistics | GS1 versions of EDIFACT messages such as ORDERS |
Transport routes
The transport protocol determines how the document reaches the other side:
- AS2: transfer over HTTP; the document is encrypted, signed and can be compressed. The receipt comes back as an MDN message.
- OFTP2: Odette's file transfer protocol (RFC 5024).
- SFTP and FTP: file-based transfer.
EDI in SAP
On the SAP side, EDI documents are usually received and sent as IDocs; the basic types ORDERS05 for purchase orders and INVOIC02 for invoices are common. The middleware handles the mapping between the IDoc and the partner's standard, and the transport. Typical flows:
- An order from a customer (ORDERS) becomes a sales order, and an order response (ORDRSP) goes back.
- On shipment a despatch advice (DESADV) is sent to the customer.
- The invoice (INVOIC) goes to the customer by EDI.
- A delivery schedule (DELFOR or VDA 4905) is sent to the supplier.
EDI with SAP PI/PO
In SAP PI/PO, EDI uses the B2B add-on. It contains the AS2, OFTP and X.400 adapters and the EDI Separator, which splits a bulk EDI file into individual messages. According to SAP's 2019 statement, the B2B add-on has been part of the SAP PO licence since April 2014; its maintenance also follows the SAP PI/PO 7.5 schedule. For details see our SAP PI/PO consulting page.
EDI with SAP Integration Suite
In SAP Integration Suite three capabilities work together:
We describe the SAP Integration Suite side on our SAP Integration Suite consulting page.
What EDI delivers
The benefit of EDI is concrete: orders and invoices are not typed by hand, the same data is not entered twice, and delivery of the document is recorded at protocol level (with the MDN in AS2). With a middleware layer, failed messages show up on one monitoring screen and are reprocessed there.
In our EDI projects we build integrations to the specifications of our customers' trading partners. Companies whose EDI formats we have worked with in these projects include Audi, BMW, BSH, Dana, Drylock, Ford, Litens, Mercedes-Benz, Raicam, Robert Bosch, Siemens, thyssenkrupp, Timken, Valeo and WABCO.