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Home to SAP R3 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

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"Electronic Data Interchange is here to stay. SAP has provided many tools to ease the integration to EDI subsystems and these, together with a methodology of how to implement EDI are described in the following pages."

A definition

"Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is about doing business and carrying out transactions with your trading partners electronically. EDI covers most things that are traditionally done using paper-based communication."

"EDI is described as the interchange of structured data according to agreed message standards between computer systems, by electronic means. Structured data equates to a simple and direct method of presenting the data content of a document. The method of ensuring the correct interpretation of the information by the computer system is defined by the EDI standard."

"EDI is a technique used to communicate business transactions between computer systems of different companies and organizations. Note that sometimes the EDI mechanism deployed at a company is often used to interface to other systems within the same organization."

Some thoughts

You should not to attempt to switch to a full SAP EDI implementation overnight. It takes time for people, systems, and processes to adapt to any new methodology. Implementing SAP EDI is a project in its own right and needs to be handled phase by phase as in any other information system implementation. We describe some of the issues and how to implement an SAP EDI solution in the following pages.

The painful issues of implementing EDI are considered to be:

Application level configuration - Message control, partner determination, output determination
Technical configuration - Just getting the systems to talk to each other. SAP, translator, modem...
Testing - How do you test with someone you may never meet? How do you do your own testing without sending data to your partner? How do you differentiate between a test message and a real one?
Mapping - How do you map an IDoc to an EDI message? What fields go where?

Page last updated on Tuesday, April 16, 2002

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