> Care to share what "right architecture" could look like?
I can speak about ANSI X12 because I've used it (North America), haven't used EDIFACT (non-North America):
Each document type, like a PO or Invoice has a defined structure (by the standards group) which is conceptually nested/hierarchical but physically stored as a combination of tags at the line level combined with delimited elements within a line.
Traditionally the raw data would be pass through a translator tool that converted it into it's hierarchal structure and a person could define a mapping from that structure to their internal systems data structure.
With the internet and XML and JSON, many people/companies weren't aware of the standards and didn't have an EDI translator, so they just winged it and extracted what they needed from the raw data.
There is still a large volume of EDI based data movement and it will probably live for a long time due to cost to change plus having standard document definitions across companies reduces the level of effort to connect many partners to many other partners (it basically reduces the transformations down to a conversation about which things each company does uniquely in the document as opposed to starting from scratch with a completely custom document for every company).
I can speak about ANSI X12 because I've used it (North America), haven't used EDIFACT (non-North America):
Each document type, like a PO or Invoice has a defined structure (by the standards group) which is conceptually nested/hierarchical but physically stored as a combination of tags at the line level combined with delimited elements within a line.
Traditionally the raw data would be pass through a translator tool that converted it into it's hierarchal structure and a person could define a mapping from that structure to their internal systems data structure.
With the internet and XML and JSON, many people/companies weren't aware of the standards and didn't have an EDI translator, so they just winged it and extracted what they needed from the raw data.
There is still a large volume of EDI based data movement and it will probably live for a long time due to cost to change plus having standard document definitions across companies reduces the level of effort to connect many partners to many other partners (it basically reduces the transformations down to a conversation about which things each company does uniquely in the document as opposed to starting from scratch with a completely custom document for every company).