EDIFACT
Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce and Transport
Big customers such as supermarkets and wholesalers often don't want your orders and delivery notes by email: they want a message their system reads by itself, with no one retyping it. One internationally agreed format for those messages, with set codes for orders, shipping notices and invoices, has been the standard in European retail and logistics for decades. It is called EDIFACT.
Each kind of message has a short code: ORDERS for an order, DESADV for a despatch advice, INVOIC for an invoice. Other formats do the same job, such as X12 in North America and XML-based ones; EDIFACT is the one you will meet most often in Europe.
You rarely need to read the raw message. A connector or an integration service translates it into something your own systems understand, and back again. What you do need to know is which messages your customer expects, and by when.
In practice
A retail chain sends an ORDERS message at six in the morning. Your system reads it, creates the order and, when the pallets leave, sends back a DESADV. Nobody at either company types anything.
Further reading
Ready to see BizBloqs on your own process?
Book a demo and we will walk your warehouse and order flow end to end — inbound, storage, picking, shipping, returns — and tell you honestly what BizBloqs would change.
Two questions about your own operation
How many of your articles sit in a pick location they empty less than once a month?
Part one: Laying out a warehouse does not start with the racking
After your last integration, how many systems hold a stock quantity for the same item? Name them.