The following represents a typical flow in a typical EDI transaction:
A trading partner sends another trading partner a business document. For example, a physician’s office sends a medical claim to the patient’s insurance agency.
The receiving trading partner’s EDI translation software both maps the data and verifies that the EDI transaction conforms to an agreed-upon standard.
A number of different ways exist to verify both incoming and outgoing EDI data to determine its compliance with both the trading partner’s requirements and the standard being used.
The following is true for incoming EDI documents:
The EDI data is posted directly to the receiving application and checked for syntactical errors as it is posted. Both good (syntactically correct) and bad (syntactically incorrect) data are posted. The bad data is listed on an error report and posted to the log.
The EDI data is checked for syntactical errors before posting. Only the good data is passed to the conversion and posting routines. The bad data is listed on an error report and posted to the log.
The EDI data is converted and posted to the application without any syntactical error checks. The application performs a compliance check on the data and returns an application acknowledgement indicating whether the data was good or bad.
The following is true for outgoing EDI documents:
The EDI data is verified for syntactical correctness as it is generated, and the results are posted to the log.
The EDI data is generated and the resulting EDI file is verified for syntactical correctness. The results are posted to the log.
In each case, a functional acknowledgement can be generated from the log and sent back to the trading partner.
With ECMap, you can automatically create compliance maps to validate that an X12 message being sent or received is compliant with the definition specified in the EDI Standard. Compliance maps can be created for the full X12 Standard or any subsets of the Standard, including subsets defined by imported SEF Standards (Implementation Guides). In addition, ECMap lets you combine user-generated compliance checking with data mapping. When you set up your compliance map, you can tailor the compliance checking to fit data verification scenarios suited to your needs.
