In late May I attended the annual two-day conference of the Uniform Code Council. I have belonged to the Uniform Code Council, or UCC as it is commonly known, for years.

This organization formulates and maintains the EDI standards used by the retail industry.

Commonly their annual conference is attended by the likes of 3M, Ace Hardware, Campbell Soups, Dial, Federated, Walmart and Neiman-Marcus, to name just a few.

This conference gives me a chance to measure the evolution of EDI and comment on that evolution to you. Each year I look for the themes being played in the industry and this year found four of note: (1) UCC-Net, (2) competing electronic data standards, (3) UPC-EAN and (4) Simple-EDI. 

Theme: UCC-Net.
Several years ago, UCC was asked to solve a long-standing problem: the retailer and manufacturers do not use the same item codes to describe the attributes of the item like pack size, dimensions, weight, etc. There are about 30 attributes in the end. With the internet readily available, UCC designed and developed UCC-Net, a product code registry. Each organization handling a item “registers” their coding for the same in this registry thereby allowing UCC-Net (the registry) to have a common set of codes for each item. Each organization could thereupon integrate their internal code management systems with UCC-Net and thereby employ standard item attribute coding.

UCC-Net is deployed but not fully in use. There is a lot of resistance to it. Firstly, it is expensive to make the back office system changes necessary to dynamically integrate with the registry. More significantly, UCC-Net does not address the need for standard price coding. Pricing is tough. Considering all the deals, give-backs, discounts, premiums, etc. that exist, UCC has been struggling with little success to standardize item price coding. There is this moment when one wonders how something as important as pricing was not included from the beginning.

Theme: Competing standards
Previously, it required organizations (like UCC) to culture collaborations within industries or disciplines. An organization’s ability to collect and disseminate information was integral to the process. The Internet is allowing collaboration without the need for these more tangible and formal organizations. Now geographically diverse parties can now hook together on the Internet and work on common subjects quickly and easily.

Combined with the pace of software development and the desire to exchange information on the Web, new data formatting standards are evolving regularly outside of the UCC domain. Internet exchanges, where a specific commodity is traded, are developing new coding standards for their own purposes. And while these standards may resemble existing standards, they are indeed different.

Therefore, the role UCC fulfills was also a subject of discussion. Other standard bearers were at the conference, as were Companies promoting their consulting ability when it came to maintaining interfaces to multiple standards. UCC is under pressure as it now must compete, willingly or not, with other electronic data interchange standards.

Theme: UPC-EAN
UPC stands for Universal product Code. EAN stands for European Article Numbering. Business has gone global and the UPC needs a country code prefix added to it which the EAN code has always had. The United States retail industry is rolling out GTIN “Global Trade Item Numbers” which will replace UPC codes or co-exist with them. This GTIN number will uniquely identify items and where they were manufactured. 

Theme: Simple EDI
The EDI standards have been in use since the 60’s. Over the years they have become so rich and so diverse they are hard to put to use quickly. The use of the standards has become subject to interpretation in that the sender and receiver of an EDI code may treat a code differently even though it “means the same thing”. Consider that there are different EDI codes for these circumstances: at terminal, available for delivery, on hand, actually placed.

EDI is expensive in part because the standards require the transmission of additional data elements which may not actually be needed by the receiver. Why send the 8 digit date of a BL when  you got the BL from the party you’re EDI’ing to.

An alternate standards (non-UCC) movement is underway to hack away at the EDI standards and pare them down to a more simple and elementary construct. Some of this work is already being employed by a couple particular industries as it applies to the receipt and payment of purchase orders.  

Seth MacLean is the principal of MacLean Associates, Sudbury, Massachusetts. His company specializes in multi-location and single-site Unix based carrier accounting and  inventory control systems. He can be reached at seth@macleanassociates.com