850 PO as one of the common EDI transactions
850 PO is the most commonly used EDI transaction. The 850 PO contains at least 70% of information that will be used on the Invoice and the Advanced Ship Notice. The 850 PO transaction could be implemented as a single transaction between the buyer and seller. The transaction set can be used to provide for customary and established business and industry practice relative to the placement of purchase orders for goods and services. This transaction set should not be used to convey purchase order changes or purchase order acknowledgment information.
The 850 Purchase Order example above has only one ship to location. A lot of retailers are now sending a single purchase order with multiple ship-to locations; sometimes even to over 2,000 ship to locations in one PO. Those are typically direct-to-store delivery orders and will usually contain an SDQ segment at the line item level to reference the QTY and the Ship-To-Location point.
Sometimes the sender of the 850 PO will require an 855 PO Acknowledgement document which acknowledges the receipt of a 850 PO and confirms for the sender how much of the order the vendor can fulfill and when to expect delivery. The Purchase Order Change Document 860 may be used by the sender to indicate a change of the original 850 PO. In the grocery industry the Purchase Order is referred to as 875 Grocery Product PO.
Each EDI Purchase Order document will have data organized into segments and data elements. Each segment contains at least one data element. Each data element is a data field. Examples of data elements on the Purchase Order include vendor number, item, quantity, price per item, street address, city, state and zip code, just like on a paper purchase order. The standards bodies have allowed for every conceivable possibility for data on the EDI Purchase Order document. Any one company will use a small subset of the available choices within the ANS X.12 or UN/EDIFACT standards.