Re: EDIFACT Question

[edi lst]

Title: RE: VMI Workflow

Hi John,   With regard to your question, you will always find that your EDIFACT interchange will contain a UNB/UNZ.  The main information in the UNB being the addressing information ie. Sender/Recipient.  These segments are mandatory.   The UNA is conditional and occurs before the UNB.  As you may already know EDIFACT (like other standards) uses specific characters which separate individual data items.  The UNA allows the sender to change which separator characters are used in the following EDIFACT data.  If the default separators are used, then there is no need to send the UNA.  It is therefore not common to send a UNA segment, as most EDIFACT data uses the default separator characters.  However, I have seen it used and can not be completely forgotten.  I have also seen companies that send the UNA even though they do not alter the standard separator characters, ie. they always send UNA:+.? '   As for EDIFACT Functional Groups, they are not used to any great extent in Europe.  They are used when more than one type of message needs to be sent in a single EDI interchange, under normal circumstances only a single type of message is sent in each EDI interchange.  As with the UNA above, I have seen companies that always send a UNG/UNE even when there is only one type of message in an interchange and hence the UNG/UNE are not required.  One of the documents pulled from the EDIFACT site says the following : "For interchanges of data to/from North America, the use of functional grouping is mandatory. For other interchange applications, its use is optional, but should be specified in the interchange agreement."  In practice I have seen EDIFACT data sent within Europe both with and without Functional Groups, I have also seen data sent to the US with and without Functional Groups.   As with most things EDI, if your a supplier and your big customer says "I want a UNA and Functional Groups", then I think we all know what the result will be.   Cheers ________________________________________________________________ Ian Crawford eMail : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web : www.eprosper.co.uk eProsper Ltd. : Electronic Commerce Service Provider     ----- Original Message ----- From: John Nadvornik To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 5:36 PM Subject: EDIFACT Question I work with a company that is about to begin an EDIFACT implementation. We are trying to get an idea of what the "standard" use is of the UNA, UNB/UNZ and UNG/UNE segments. I have seen a few examples of EDIFACT in my research and I have yet to see a use of the UNA or UNG/UNE segments. In anyone's experience, do companies generally just utilize the UNB/UNZ segments in conjunction with the individual messages or do they include the Functional Group level as well? Thank you in advance for your assistance with this matter. John