EDI — Electronic Data Interchange — is the structured electronic exchange of business documents between trading partners' computer systems using standardized formats. It is the technical foundation of every modern customs filing system, including ACE, AMS, ABI, and AES, and of B2B supply chain integration broadly.
The two dominant EDI standard families:
- ANSI X.12 — the U.S. national standard maintained by the American National Standards Institute. Used in U.S. customs (ABI, AMS, AES) and most North American B2B.
- EDIFACT — the UN/EDIFACT international standard maintained by the United Nations. Dominant in Europe, Asia, and international ocean shipping.
A typical EDI message consists of segments, elements, and identifiers in a strict syntax. For example, an X.12 309 (Customs Manifest) message contains segments like ISA (Interchange Control Header), GS (Functional Group Header), M10 (Manifest Identifying Information), and many more. Each segment has positional elements with specific data types and lengths.
EDI implementations are typically deployed through:
- Direct point-to-point connections — large trading partners with their own EDI infrastructure
- VANs (Value-Added Networks) — intermediary message-routing services
- AS2 connections — modern internet-based EDI transport
- Service providers — software vendors that handle EDI for clients (Descartes, GT Nexus, CargoWise)
Despite the rise of REST APIs and modern data interchange, EDI is the dominant standard in customs and ocean shipping — both because of regulatory inertia (CBP, IATA, and ports built their systems on EDI) and because of its sophisticated transactional semantics for high-volume B2B.