EDI Label

On May 18, 2009. By Fran, under Industry News, Tech Talk.

The “EDI Label” commonly known as a UCC-128, and now re-branded GS1-128, has always been a natural extension of the EDI process. It provides a link between the digital EDI transaction and actual physical carton or pallet. This link becomes critically important to your trading partner in order to expedite the receiving of goods and the routing to their final destinations. It won’t take long to find out just how critical the integrity of these labels is when you are suddenly bombarded for invalid labeling. If your trading partner has to suffer by manually handling your shipment they will literally make you pay.

The defined layout of this label is almost standard from trading partner to trading partner but there are always exceptions. These special requirements are one of the biggest challenges that the suppliers of the retail industry faces. The format of the label will fit on a standard 4″ wide by 6″ tall label stock. The different sections of the label are often referred to as zones. Your average label will always have zones for the ‘ship from’ and ‘ship to’ addresses along with carrier details.

The main key element is the SSCC-18 (serial shipping container code) commonly located in the bottom zone of the label. This is the code that gets transmitted in the EDI Advanced Ship Notice and can be used to reference the contents of the cartons. Another frequently seen zone containing a barcode on the label is the store number. This aids in the routing of the package once it arrives at a distribution center. There are some trading partners that have unique requirements. There are cases where they have asked for item specific information such as size, color and type. Additional barcoded information is sometimes also requested, such as a purchase order number or UPC number.

As a client support manager, I have seen first hand the common errors that my customers face on a day to day basis. One issue that has shown itself regularly is the reusing of SSCC-18 numbers. Most trading partner will not allow you to duplicate a shipment number within a year to avoid obvious confusion during receiving. There have also been occasions where the customer, after creating their ASN and producing their labels, need to make a change to the shipment and recreate their ASN and often forget to generate new labels with the updated carton numbers. Since there is no link between the physical box and the ASN transaction anymore, the ASN becomes useless and will most assuredly result in chargeback’s.

It is very important that your EDI system be capable of managing labels so that your process runs smoothly from beginning to end.

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