The Inovis Blog

Last month, UN/EDIFACT released their latest directory of EDI messages, D.09A.  The “A” in the version designation means it was the first one for 2009.  For those who follow EDIFACT, that’s rather late in the year for the first directory.  But at least it’s here.  What’s much more interesting about this directory is the addition of the Government Cross Border Regulatory message better known by its 6-character name, GOVCBR.  The message’s structure has 733 segments in 231 segment groups (also known as loops to the X12ers out there).  This summer, I saw a preliminary draft of the message and at that time it looked to have in the neighborhood of 1,000 segments in 258 segment groups!  The next largest is the long-lived IFCSUM message which weighs in at a scant (by comparison) 264 segments in 76 segment groups.

The new GOVCBR message was created largely outside of EDIFACT by the WCO (World Customs Organization) based in Brussels.  My own limited experience with customs activity suggests that adoption of the GOVCBR message may not be immediate.  Different sub-departments within U.S. Customs use varying implementations of several X12 transaction sets as well as some EDIFACT messages.  Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) in the U.K. has a set of unique messages that share the same syntax (ISO 9735) as EDIFACT.  I bet there are other variants.

In any case, as soon as I got the new directory, I gave it a once- (or twice-) over and found two message definitions that had problems.  The QALITY message specification had a minor formatting issue that was purely cosmetic.  (Ironic, yes?)  The GOVCBR message structure contains several mistakes.

• There are three instances of segment groups (numbers 106, 185 and 229) that begin with the MEA segment where the maximum occurrences of the segment itself is specified as 99 (as all you EDI folks out there know, the trigger segment of a segment group or loop must only occur one time per iteration).
• The looping structure lines for segment group 152 are incorrect.  They show the segment group contains only the NAD segment when it should, in fact, also contain the DTM which follows as well as the entirety of segment group 153.
• There are three segment groups which all contain a single segment, the CTA segment which is usually paired with the COM segment.  In fact, I’m told that the COM segments that follow those three instances should have been included in the respective segment groups.

According to the response I got from EDIFACT, these problems were missed in two reviews prior to publication.  I was further informed that these issues would be addressed in the upcoming D.09B which is already in progress and should be out within the next month or so.

I understand that the GOVCBR was considered urgent and therefore fast-tracked and delayed the release of the D.09A directory.  On the other hand, I’m concerned about the seeming variance in EDIFACT development procedures and apparent decline of their quality assurance processes.