EDIFACT

Electronic Data Interchange For Administration, Commerce and Transport. The dominant EDI standard outside North America since 1987.

What is EDIFACT?

EDIFACT is a standard that defines the structure and syntax of messages exchanged between applications across organisations. Where XML or JSON describe objects today inside tag-based text, EDIFACT describes its information as segments — each a three-letter code (BGM, NAD, LIN, DTM…) — separated by reserved characters.

The intent has not changed in forty years: enable two systems — ERP, WMS, TMS, buyer portal — to exchange a purchase order, an invoice, or a despatch advice unambiguously, at scale, with guaranteed machine-readability. In 2026 EDIFACT still carries the bulk of European retail EDI traffic, plus large volumes in automotive, logistics, and the chemical industry.

Anatomy of a message

An EDIFACT message is wrapped inside an interchange, delimited by a UNB header and a UNZ trailer. Within it, one or several individual messages are delimited by UNH / UNT. A minimal interchange looks like this:

UNB+UNOC:3+SENDER:14+RECEIVER:14+260513:1430+CTRL000001'
UNH+1+ORDERS:D:96A:UN:EAN008'
BGM+220+ORDER789+9'
DTM+137:20260513:102'
NAD+BY+5410000000123::9'
NAD+SU+5410000000456::9'
LIN+1++3520000001234:EN'
QTY+21:2'
UNS+S'
CNT+2:1'
UNT+9+1'
UNZ+1+CTRL000001'

Every segment opens with its tag (three letters) and closes with an apostrophe '. Composite elements are separated by +; their components by :. A UNA service string advice may appear at the head of an interchange to redefine these separators if the payload requires it.

Versions

UN/CEFACT publishes two directories per year, named D.<YY>A and D.<YY>B. A few milestones:

Use cases

EDIFACT has settled into individual sectors, sometimes via industry subsets that constrain or augment the official directory:

• Retail / FMCG — via the GS1 EANCOM subset (based on D.96A then D.01B).
• European automotive — via the Odette subset (JIT orders, synchronous deliveries).
• Chemicals — via CEFIC.
• Electronics — via EDIFICE.
• Logistics and multimodal transport — IFTMIN, IFTSTA, IFTMBC messages for booking and tracking.
• Petrochemicals — via PIDX.

Tools

To explore EDIFACT in practice:

• EDIFACT Validator — syntactic validation locally, in your browser, with no data sent over the network.

Further reading

Common messages every integrator quickly meets:

ORDERS D.96A purchase order · ORDRSP D.96A order response · DESADV D.96A despatch advice · INVOIC D.96A invoice

Official UN/CEFACT sources: service.unece.org/trade/untdid for historical directories, and the official directory download for recent versions.