A Guide To EDI For Publishers

Publishers are being put under a great deal of pressure by the big distributors, such as Amazon, Baker & Taylor and Border’s, to implement EDI transactions. There is a lot of confusion about what an EDI transaction is. I decided to put together this blog post to help explain some of these technical terms.

EDI: What does it stand for and what exactly is it?

EDI, or Electronic Data Interchange, is a computer-to-computer of business documents, in a standardized format, between two companies.

Although it has a technical-sounding name, EDI is fundamentally a business initiative that has been developed over the past 30 years. It was pioneered by the transportation, retail and grocery industries in an effort to increase quality and customer service, and offer long-term cost benefits. EDI also represents a major step in creating a paperless office.

By replacing paper documents, such as purchase orders or invoices, with their EDI “equivalent” (a computer-readable EDI document), four key benefits are realized:

1. Accuracy is increased because human intervention (the acts of entering and re-keying data) is eliminated.
2. Timeliness is increased (the electronic transmission of forms eliminates the delays inherent in conventional mail, or even Fax).
3. Customer service process is automated.
4. Bottom line costs are reduced for the trading partners.

The Definition of EDI Explained:

“Computer-to-computer” means that the data you send or receive from a bookstore (the most common examples are invoices or purchase orders) is communicated via electronic transmission, without human intervention or interpretation.

“Business documents” means that EDI will be used for the exchange of specific documents only, such as purchase orders or invoices.

“Standardized format” is at the heart of EDI and causes much confusion among publishers. EDI requires you to follow standards that define the format and content of your business documents. When you start using EDI, PO’s and invoices will be converted by the EDI translation software program into the exact same format as those used by all the other publishers using EDI. (The publishing industry EDI standards have been set by the BISAC – recently renamed BASIC – committee of the Book Industry Study Group.) This means that each purchase order, invoice, or pack slip will be completely readable by any computer used by any bookseller using EDI.

In Summary:

When you do business via EDI, you send business documents directly from one computer to another, the documents are in a machine-processable format, the exchange is limited to documents, and the document exchange is governed by standards.

EDI has also created a vocabulary of terms that publishers should know. These terms will be posted in a separate entry later this week. The terms, as well as this guide to EDI for publishers, will be available in whitepaper form on our website, in our Whitepaper Library, shortly. Stay tuned! If you’d like to request a PDF of any of the whitepapers in our library, please contact me directly. I can be reached at (708) 587-4116 or kshay@ware-pak.com