What is EDIFACT?
EDIFACT stands for Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce and Transport. It is the international standard published by the United Nations for structuring and exchanging business documents electronically between organisations.
If your company buys from suppliers, sells to retailers, ships goods with logistics partners, or operates in manufacturing — there is a good chance your trading partners are already sending and receiving EDIFACT messages. The question is whether you are handling them automatically or manually.
What does it actually do?
EDIFACT replaces paper and PDF documents with structured electronic messages that computers can read and process without human intervention. Instead of a supplier emailing you a PDF invoice that your accounts payable team manually re-enters into your ERP, an EDIFACT INVOIC message arrives and is automatically matched against the purchase order and delivery receipt — and posted to your accounts payable ledger without anyone touching it.
The same principle applies to every document in the supply chain:
- ORDERS — purchase orders sent from buyer to supplier
- ORDRSP — the supplier's acknowledgement of the order
- DESADV — advance shipping notice sent before delivery
- RECADV — goods receipt confirmation
- INVOIC — electronic invoice
- REMADV — payment remittance advice
Who uses EDIFACT?
EDIFACT is the dominant B2B document exchange standard in Europe. If you trade with any of the following, you are almost certainly already required to support some form of EDI:
- Major grocery retailers (Kaufland, Lidl, Metro, Billa)
- Automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers
- Pharmaceutical distributors
- Large logistics and freight companies
- Financial institutions and banks
Does my business need it?
Ask yourself three questions:
- Do any of your trading partners send you purchase orders, invoices, or delivery notices by email or PDF?
- Does your team manually re-enter data from those documents into your ERP or accounting system?
- Do any of your customers or suppliers ask about EDI capability?
What does implementation involve?
A standard EDIFACT integration has four components:
- Message mapping — translating between your trading partner's EDIFACT message format and your internal ERP data structure
- Trading partner onboarding — establishing test connections, certifying message exchanges, and agreeing on message versions and variants
- ERP integration — connecting the mapped messages to your SAP, Dynamics, Oracle, or bespoke system
- Go-live and monitoring — supervised cutover to production, with ongoing message monitoring
The bottom line
EDIFACT is not new technology. It has been the backbone of European B2B trade for over 30 years. What has changed is that the tooling for implementing it has improved significantly, and the cost of not having it — in manual labour, errors, and lost trading partner relationships — has grown.
If you are still processing supplier invoices manually or receiving purchase orders by email, EDIFACT integration should be on your short list of operational improvements.
Ready to implement EDIFACT?
If you are evaluating whether EDIFACT integration makes sense for your business, read our guide on how to evaluate an EDIFACT vendor before signing anything. For a deeper technical overview, see our article on EDIFACT and SAP integration.
Or contact us directly — we offer a free 30-minute discovery call with no commitment.