Definition: An ANSI protocol that defines a set of standards for documents involved in electronic data interchange.

Overview

The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) chartered an Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) in 1979 to develop a set of standards for the documents that are exchanged through Electronic data inter-change (EDI). The standard has periodically been revised by the ASC, with version 2 being established in 1986, version 3 in 1992, version 4 in 1997, and version 5 in 2004. The standard defines Transaction sets to capture the information that would be found in a paper document. For example, the X.12 transaction set 850 represents an outbound purchase order, 860 a purchase order change document, 855 a purchase order acknowledgement document, set 856 represents packing slips, and 810 represents invoices.

The X.12 standard breaks a transaction set into logical groups of data called Segments. For example, the 850 purchase order set could contain the following segments: a transaction set header, an initial segment, a reference number, a date/time reference, carrier details, name, product identifier, physical details of the item, marking/ packing/loading, destination quantity, and transaction totals. All segments for each transaction set are extensive because they have to be usable by many different organizations, and it is usual for only subsets of the defined segments to be utilized by each company. The segments are themselves composed of data items; thus the item “marking/packing/loading” could contain the fields item description type, packaging characteristic code, association qualifier code, and packaging description code.