EDI

Welcome to Variety Wholesalers’ Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) Specifications online!  This page of our website contains links to the Retail Industry subset of ASC X12 Version 4010 VICS specifications for each of the types of EDI documents Variety Wholesalers trades with its domestic vendors.  We have found EDI to be the most efficient and cost-effective method for exchanging all kinds of business data, both for VW and for its vendors, and hope you will participate in an EDI partnership with us.

Variety Wholesalers considers it a high priority to trade purchase orders with its vendors via EDI, and have included our 850 Purchase Order Document specifications here for your use.  If you have not traded EDI documents with Variety Wholesalers before, this will be the document we are most likely to implement first.

In addition to purchase orders, we also trade the 810 Invoice Document, if the vendor is able to supply an Invoice document that meets VW’s specifications. 

For Vendor Managed Inventory partners only, we can provide the 852 Sales and Activity Data document, and accept the 856 Advanced Ship Notice Document.  The 856 ASN will be converted in our internal  systems to a VW Purchase Order.  Important Note:  In order to trade these documents, the vendor must have established his own internal VMI auto-replenishment system, which can accept the 852 document and turn it into 856 shipment documents.  The vendor’s system must be able to contain data representing current store on-hand quantities, ideal inventory levels, the item assortments available to each store, and store status and address information.  In addition, there must be a reliable set of programs to process that data, in order to maintain store inventories at the ideal levels.  Development, testing, and implementation of the vendor’s system are the complete responsibility of the vendor; VW does not participate or assist in that development effort.

VW does not expect, nor can we process, the 856 ASN document as a shipping advice for an 850 Purchase Order document the vendor has received from us.  Please do not send 856 documents if you are not a VMI partner.

No EDI documents of any type should be sent before a trading partner relationship is established and the vendor has been informed that we are ready for testing.  The vendor’s EDI staff must communicate directly with VW’s EDI Coordinator, Lisa Cooper, to make the proper arrangements.  Lisa may be reached at [email protected], or by telephone at 252-430-2303.  Contact by e-mail is highly preferred.

Please note that if you are brand new to EDI, and Variety Wholesalers is your first trading partner, you should complete testing with your VAN or other EDI service provider before contacting VW for document testing.  It is vital that the document testing process not be complicated by communication issues common between new EDI participants and their service providers.

VARIETY does have EDI trading partners that employ various 3rd party providers which includes versions of web-forms. It is not VARIETY’s responsibility to contact vendor’s 3rd party EDI providers. It is standard business protocol that – YOU, as their customer, contact your 3rd party provider to implement an EDI relationship with VARIETY. We have established 850 & 810 relationships/maps with: SPS Commerce, High Jump-True Commerce, DICENTRAL, Covalentworks, Core Force and EDICT/GROCEC.