>>I was asked by a client whether I was familiar with EDI. I said that I understood that acronym and what it implied, but was unsure if it was a specific process or related to languages or systems. Can anyone give me a heads-up on what this is in the business/development world and is it more than just being able to transfer data from one place to another? Thanks!
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>>Regards, Renoir
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>Electronic Data Interchange. In brief :
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>Transfer from data via standards (f.e. EDIFACT), usually taylor-made by EDI-providers. The addressing goes via "mailboxes"", with in between a VAN (Value Added Network, often via X400).
>F.e. one company sends a purchase order, and the other reads it in as sales order. Many more "messages" exist.
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>Just starts to get familiar to businesses, but is oldfashioned already because of the possibilities of Internet. Newest fashion may be ebXML, though EDI will stick for a while.
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>Companies spent tonnes of money on the development of the messages, or better : the interfacing with their relations, the testing, and the blaming of eachother why things don't work.

A BIG area of use is the ANSIX12/DNS version of EDI for the transmission of medical data between doctors, claim processing centers and insurance firms. The doctor's staff just fills in a a webpage (one of many based on the insurance company requirements) that is available at a processing center. The processing center software reads the data from the webpage, formats it into the X12 format and sends it to the insurance company. The insurance company replys to the processing center, and the doctor can check on the progress of the claims that were submitted. Many doctors use the same processing center, which acts as a hub. And the processing center has formats that match the requirements of many insurance companies. It is a like a many-to one-to many situation. The processing center I helped solved some problems for, a few months ago, (ssssh! moonlighted for an old client who owns it) was running WebConnect on an SMP NT4, being accessed by VFP software and stored in VFP tables, and they were processing about 10,000 claims a day, no sweat. Expected to ramp up to 50K per day later.