What is an EDI Implementation Convention?
EDI standards developed and maintained by the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 accommodate a full range of business activities for all industries. They are developed by consensus among a large number of users, each with their own requirements. The resulting standard is very broad and is intended as a superset to meet the diverse requirements of all users. They commonly contain more data elements and structure options than any one user, or industry, needs. In fact, they often contain many optional ways of conveying the same information. Because of the broad nature of the basic EDI standard(s), there are many possible interpretations. Therefore, actual implementations require Implementation Conventions (ICs) to clearly define the transactions. An EDI Implementation Convention (IC) is a proper subset of the associated ASC X12 standard. An IC defines the exact transactions required by a trading partner community to conduct business by tailoring the use of the ASC X12 standards’ seg
