Summary

For a long time, there have been complaints in our branch of industry that the acquisition and administration of advertisements require too much time as they all come in written down totally differently, then have to be rewritten as a confirmation of order, and finally require yet another manual process for invoicing. When purchasing consumables from different suppliers, and when distributing the final products to different consignees, the rewriting procedure is a disruptive element which eludes general automation. Some manufacturers of software products have recently taken up this problem by developing custom-made programs which specify a structured acquisition of data so that the subsequent documents can be drawn up by automatic transfer of data. It can be re- garded as a disadvantage, though, that these are custom-made solutions as they depend on certain machine configurations. As a rule, a customer who has chosen a different system cannot be connected to the firm accepting the order without complications. In 1986, in conjunction with the ANSI/ASC X.12 (American National Standards Institute, Accredited Standards Committee X. 12), the UN/ECE therefore developed a standard for this purpose called EDIFACT (Electronic Data Interchange for Administra- tion, Commerce and Transport). Trade associations from the chemical, automobile, transport, banking and insurance industry which have since then been using their own custom-made systems are currently joining the EDIFACT concept along a wide front. In order to also introduce the harmonising EDIFACT standard into our branch, the newspaper printing industry, IFRA has, on 3 May 1993, founded a working group looking into this matter, which is devoting itself to the further development of the standard, especially with the inclusion of the possibility of digital transmission of the available advertisements’ contents, too. At the same time, it was decided to write a number of Special Reports on the subject to arouse the interest of our members in EDIFACT. This is the first in a series of Special Reports dedicated to the EDIFACT interchange standard, which is aimed at informing the reader about the basic principles of EDIFACT. Further reports on case studies and the telecommunications requirements are to follow. We would like this report to be received favourably by the readers and will happily answer any questions in connection with it.