received stampAs electronic trading continues to evolve, one of the areas of interest is with buying organizations wanting to get confirmation of the receipt of orders, on-going alerts on the order status and managing requested changes. What I'm talking about here is the use of the 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgement transaction and the confusion on the expected use or interpretation of this transaction.

 
EDI Standards definition/Usage - X12 EDI Standards defines the use of the 855 transaction in two ways -
  1. The transaction set can be used to provide for customary and established business and industry practice relative to a seller's acknowledgment of a buyer's purchase order.
  2. This transaction set can also be used as notification of a vendor generated order. This usage advises a buyer that a vendor has or will ship merchandise as prearranged in their partnership.
 Usage in Practice - 
    1. The transaction set can be used to convey acceptance or rejection of changes to a previously submitted purchase order by the seller or
    2. to notify the buyer of changes initiated by the seller to a previously submitted purchase order by the seller. 
To add further color to the 865, the more common use, thus why the growth in interest of this transaction, is with B2C order fulfillment. Those that use this transaction for B2C are really only using this for Confirmation that a Canceled order has been kept from being shipped or not. I have yet to seen any retailers that I've worked with that are using the 865 as indicated in #a above.
 
So, what is the correct usage of the 855 as a Purchase Order knowledge vs. the 865 POC acknowledgement? Maybe they both are? I'd love to have feedback on your experience with these. However, at this point, the usage I've explained above is in practice. Thus Standards may be getting redefined. Some of what is happening in practice may be that the 855 is more established, and it's easier to go with what is in place verses using a new transaction.
 
Lastly, regardless of whether the 855 or the 865 are used as a Supplier's Request for "Change" or "Provide order statuses" there is value to trading partners exchanging data to automate this process that had in the past been manual (something about an "Audit Trail" or holding partners "accountable").