EDI Basics

History of EDI

EDI was first commercially implemented in the mid 1960s initially in the rail and road transport industries. In 1968 the United States Transportation Data Coordinating Committee (TDCC) was formed, to coordinate the development of translation rules among four existing sets of industry-specific standards. A further significant move towards standardization came with the X12 standards of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which gradually extended and replaced those created by the TDCC.

At about the same time, the U.K. Department of Customs and Excise, with the assistance of SITPRO (the British Simplification of Trade Procedures Board), was developing its own standards for documents used in international trade, called Tradacoms. These were later extended by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) into what became known as the GTDI (General-purpose Trade Data Interchange \ standards), and were gradually accepted by some 2,000 British exporting organizations.

Problems created by the trans-Atlantic use of two different (and largely incompatible) sets of standardized documents have been addressed by the formation of a United Nations Joint European and North American working party (UN-JEDI), which began the development of the Electronic Data Interchange for Administration, Commerce and Transport (EDIFACT) document translation standards.