When you onboard suppliers it’s important for them to understand what the requirements are for the messages they need. A Message Implementation Guideline (MIG) refines a generic EDI standard such as UN/EDIFACT and details how it will be used for your company. In simple terms, it tells your suppliers what messages they need to send, what information the messages contain and how they’re formatted.
Here are important things you need to know…
Choosing an EDI standard
There are different EDI message standards used around the world. Once you choose a standard it will be used as the base for your MIG. Here are a few of the common ones and where they’re most used:
| UN/EDIFACT | Standard coined by the United Nations and the most commonly used worldwide, and heavily used in the Australian retail supply chain industry. |
| ANSI X.12 | Commonly used in North America |
| EANCOM | Commonly used in the European retail industry |
| ODETTE | Commonly used in the European automotive industry |
| EbXML | Global standard developed by United Nations body for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business Information Standards (UN/CEFACT) and Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS ). |
| TRADACOMS | Commonly used in the UK retail industry |
| HIPAAhow | Commonly used in the North American Healthcare industry |
| SWIFT | Commonly used by financial institutions worldwide. |
Choose the message types you want to use with your suppliers
This comes down to what your objectives are as a business. Here are some of the common messages and what they do:
- Purchase order
Sent from buyer to supplier to order goods or services
- Purchase order change
Sent from buyer to supplier if the original purchase order has changed
- Purchase order acknowledgement
Sent from the supplier to the buyer to acknowledge receipt of the order
- Purchase order response
Sent from the supplier to the buyer to let them know how much of the order can be fulfilled, and any discrepancies from the original order
- Advance shipping notice [ASN] (or despatch advice)
Sent from the supplier to the buyer to let them know when and how the goods will be shipped
- Invoice
Sent from the buyer to the supplier for payment of the goods or services
- Recipient created tax invoice (RCTI)
Sent from the supplier to the buyer for payment of the goods or services
- Remittance advice
Sent from the buyer to the supplier to confirm payment
- Price/sales catalogue
Sent from the supplier to the buyer with up-to-date product and pricing information
- Product activity data
Sent from buyer to the supplier with the number of units sold and units on hand
- Transport instruction
Sent from a buyer to a transport supplier (and related parties) to communicate transport arrangements
- Transport response
Sent from a transport provider to confirm instructions
- Functional acknowledgement
An automated response sent from a receiver of an EDI message to confirm receipt of the message.
Find out what data your ERP system requires to process your message types
This is important because it’ll determine what fields and values you need from your partners. This includes things like:
- character limits
- whether only integers are allowed
- if it needs to be number
- how many decimal places
- whether the field is dependent on another field (conditional)
- whether a field is used for particular use cases only
- how calculations are made.
From here you can provide a list of values that can be used, If not, all values in your chosen EDI standard.
We have a range of MIGs from various companies you can check out here.
Putting your MIGs together
This is where you take everything from the previous steps and document it. Writing MIGs can involve a bit of work and so you can get an external party to help. This where an EDI provider, like MessageXchange, comes in. We can assist or lead the MIG writing process, developing it from scratch or upgrading your MIG. Find out more here.
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