EDI tutorials and specifications

Question

Wondering if anyone knows of any good tutorials on working with EDI, and where one might find the type specifications? The formats I'll be largely dealing with are 846, 852, and 867. Tried several Google queries with little luck (I mainly find places selling stuff and assembly language tutorials that are talking about the x86 edi register).

Please do note that buying software is not an option here, so if you know of any free software to help with it, that would be most helpful. A suggestion to purchase something is not-there's zero budget here.

Answer 1

As far as the formats I work with (270/271, 276/277) there is an implementation guide maintained by the X12 committees that contains the standard's specifications, then specific trading partners will provide companion guides that detail their specific changes to the standard (and there are many.) I couldn't seem to find a general implementation guide for any of your standards (now that I look I couldn't quickly google the site that sells the guides for mine, either) but I did find this site which has some "guidelines" and examples for the specific formats you mentioned.

As far as free software (we use in-house software for our purposes so I'm not personally familiar with them) I've seen discussion of EDI Notepad, Bots, and Mirth Connect on SO.

Good luck, EDI can be a huge pain.

Answer 2

http://www.ediuniversity.com/

Whether you're considering EDI implementation, or need more information to persuade your trading partners, GXS offers you the informational framework to understand the benefits of EDI and how the integration of an EDI system can simplify, speed up and increase the accuracy of your business communication.

http://defuddle.pnl.gov/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/defuddle/

Defuddle is a data translation/extraction engine that supports mapping arbitrary ASCII and binary file formats to a data model defined in XML Schema using the XML-based Data Format Description Language (DFDL, forge.gridforum.org/projects/dfdl-wg/).

This one I found a while ago, I dont know if it can parse your formats. http://berryworkssoftware.net/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Jitterbit is the leading open source integration platform. For its supported customers, Jitterbit offers EDI integration based on EDIReader and EDIWriter. This feature allows you to use Jitterbit's XML graphical mapping tools to define transformations between EDI transactions and your internal formats. Go to http://www.jitterbit.com for more information.