Skip navigation

WHAT'S IN STORE?

With the development of Efficient Consumer Response, there's a lot more focus on electronic data interchange. To make sure everyone understands exactly what EDI means, here's a brief explanation. EDI is the electronic transfer of information. In the supermarket industry, EDI is facilitated by UCS (the uniform communications standard), referring to the conventions and guidelines that have been established

With the development of Efficient Consumer Response, there's a lot more focus on electronic data interchange. To make sure everyone understands exactly what EDI means, here's a brief explanation. EDI is the electronic transfer of information. In the supermarket industry, EDI is facilitated by UCS (the uniform communications standard), referring to the conventions and guidelines that have been established for EDI in this industry.

UCS came into being in the early 1980s. At that time, a committee called "ANSI X.12" was charged with standardizing electronic transmission of information from all types of diverse companies across the United States, not just the food industry. I was the representative from Supervalu, and there were committee members from Procter & Gamble, Mellon Bank, Pittsburgh Plate Glass, one of the railroads and all sorts of other companies. Because of the detail and time-consuming effort of incorporating requirements from all the different industries, and the resulting delays in getting standards approved, manufacturers and retailers in the food industry decided to develop their own standards -- and we called them UCS.

UCS is a very thick document that contains formats for a large number of transaction sets, which represent electronic versions of food industry business documents. For example, there is a purchase order transaction set, an invoice transaction set, one for shipping advice, one for payment advice, promotion announcement, item maintenance and so forth. UCS covers all the business documents used in our industry.

Transaction sets are made up of segments, which are pieces of information within the business document. The transaction set for a purchase order, for example, includes a purchase order identification segment, a carrier identification segment and a line item detail segment.

A segment consists of one or more data elements that are either mandatory, conditional or optional. The purchase order segment just mentioned contains data elements P.O. Date and P.O. Number. The carrier identification segment within the same purchase order transaction set would include data elements for shipment, method of payment, shipping mode, pallet exchange code, routing, etc. Line item detail, which can be re-used multiple times, covers all the items in a purchase order, including quantity ordered, item list cost, universal product code number and so forth. The transactions that are transmitted must be generated and received and used by a computer system, or we might as well be faxing information back and forth. Unfortunately, in many manufacturer (and retailer) organizations today, data is transmitted by one system, and then data-entered at the receiving end. The key piece is the interpretation programs at either end that can use this information electronically in order to make the business documents flow efficiently.

UCS has been around for more than a decade now and has also been incorporated into the original ANSI X.12 standards. If you'll excuse the acronym sentence, to summarize: EDI is a very critical piece of ECR, and UCS is our standard for EDI. It's actually very simple -- all we have to do is use it.

Carlene A. Thissen is president of Retail Systems Consulting, Chicago.