EDI (electronic data interchange) messages are used in a variety of industries for transmitting business information such as invoices, shipping notices, and purchase orders—which were traditionally recorded on paper—electronically. EDI transactions are structured according to standards that describe the format of each message. Adherence to a standard format enables the messages to be transmitted electronically between the computer systems of trading partners without human interaction.

Different industries take advantage of specialized EDI formats that are relevant to their business, and one such popular format is VDA EDI, which is used by the German automotive industry.

To work with VDA messages efficiently, companies often need to transform them to other formats, for instance, for storage in a backend database, or convert them to other EDI message formats for compatibility among systems. Altova MapForce makes this easy, with support for VDA as well as several other popular EDI standards. Let’s see how it works.