{{Confusing, date=July 2009 UCS, or Uniform Communication Standard, is used by the

grocery A grocery store ( AE), grocery shop ( BE) or simply grocery is a store that primarily retails a general range of food products, which may be fresh or packaged. In everyday U.S. usage, however, "grocery store" is a synonym for supermarket, a ...

and retail-oriented industries for electronic transactions. It is a subset of the

X12 X12 or X-12 may refer to: * ASC X12, the standard for the development and maintenance of Electronic Data Interchange standards for the United States * Convair X-12 The Convair SM-65B Atlas, or Atlas B, also designated X-12 was a prototype of th ...

national standard consisting of some 300-plus general-purpose EDI messages. Within that large base set, many verticals are built on a small subset with narrow focus.

Usage

While starting in the grocery side of business, current users of UCS include: * manufacturers * retailers * wholesalers * brokers * beverage (alcohol) * convenience stores * food service industries * wholesale drug * mass merchandising * service merchandising * public warehousing

History

In the 1960s, the Transportation Data Coordinating Committee DCC whose work later evolved into the ANSI X12, X12 standard began developing Electronic Data Interchange DIstandards primarily for transportation. From there, a variety of EDI implementations took root, including UCS. The original draft was designed by companies representing some of the industries noted earlier. By 1976 the design of an EDI standard was underway. It would take six years before the standard saw its first usage.

Scope

UCS supports both office-to-office (batch) and DSD, or "direct store delivery," transactions. The latter is an interactive method designed to replace paperwork by allowing systems ranging from small hand-held devices to large mainframe computers to be able to exchange delivery and return data.

External links

(Uniform Communication Standard) home page
Data interchange standards