EIDX Glossary of Terms

X12 - US ANSI standard for inter-industry electronic interchange of business transactions, managed by the  ASC X.12, hence the name "X12" for the standard.  X12 is actually a family of standards:

• X12.22 Data Segment Directory
• X12.3 Data Element Dictionary
• X12.42 Cryptographic Service Message
• X12.5 Interchange Control Structure
• X12.56 Interconnect Mailbag Control Structures
• X12.58 Security Structures
• X12.6 Application Control Structure

X12.5 Interchange Control Structures - X12 has its own protocol for addressing.  It specifies how the envelopes around an X12 transaction - the ISA and the GS segments - should be formatted.

X12.56 Interconnect Mailbag Control Structures - This ASC X12 standard is designed to control the exchange of groups of X12 transaction sets between two interconnecting entities, such as two VANs.

X.400 - A message handling service/access method and protocol for the transfer of electronic files, an International standard for message transmission.  Used in the U.S. for e-mail messaging before internet e-mail protocols like SMTP became widely available.  Used in Europe as the primary legacy method of transporting EDI files.

XML - Short for eXtensible Markup Language, a specification allowing designers to create formatting commands that enable the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.

• The XML Specification from W3C contains syntax rules, and definitions for only a limited number of tags that are necessary for the syntax rules.  Otherwise, the semantic meaning of XML tags is defined by standards organizations that define B2B content standards and by users.

• A number of organizations and users could create a tag called "<b>" and each give it a different semantic meaning.  Organization A could say that "<b>" could mean "brown" and Organization B could say that "<b>" means "blue".  In order to interpret tags, those organizations must provide DTDs and/or XML Schema, which specify the interpretation of the tags. 

• XML was designed primarily to be machine-processable, not for human readability.  XML initiatives are part of W3C's Architecture Domain, whereas HTML-related efforts are part of the User-Interface Domain.  See also HTML.

XML Schema - A mechanism for defining and describing a class of XML documents.  XML schema are more robust that XML DTDs.  Since schemas are expressed in XML, they can be parsed by XML software.  XML schema can be used to define the structures of  documents, constraints, and datatypes, which is not possible with DTDs.  However, schema can only partially describe the semantic meaning of the elements.

Yield - The amount of something produced.  In material requirements planning, the yield associated with the component on the product's bill of materials is used to determine how many of a component to procure or fabricate.

• If Product X requires 1 each of Component A, and the yield is 95%, this means that 5% of Component A parts fail on average as a by-product of the manufacturing process.  In order to build 100 of product X, a quantity of 105 Component A parts should be procured.
• If Product X requires 1 each of Component B, and the yield is 100%, a quantity of 100 Component B parts should be procured.
• But ... if Product X itself has a yield of 95%, and the Component B parts in the failed product can be re-used without any quality problems, the enterprise could end up with excess inventory on hand or in the pipeline over time.  In this case, the yield for Component B could be set to > 100% on the Bill of Materials to account for the fact that 5 of Component B will be leftover for each 100 of Product A that is built.  If the yield of 105% is set for Component B, the system will calculate that 95 of Component B should be procured or fabricated for every 100 units of Product A being built.