What is the EDI 852 Product Activity Document

Drilling down and understanding the EDI 852 POS document

After posting the Tracking Sales Trends tool blog entry, we thought it would be a good idea to give a better understanding of the POS EDI document.  For the most part, retailers (pretty much) send POS in a standard format, this blog shows a typical POS document.

Wikipedia gives a pretty weak definition of the ANSI X12.852 document.  Its description is too general and does not do a good job showing how voluminous the 852 is, and how it helps manufacturers determine sales trends and outages.

Although the retailers send a typical format, they differ in what types of data quantities they supply.  Most will send Quantity Sold (QS) and Quantity Available for Shipment (QA).  Some will also send Quantity Out-of-Stock (QO), and still other retailers will send Quantity Requested (QX).

This is where the issues arise, each retailer sends different quantities.  That is why we suggested a cloud-based POS Analytics Tool.

Our next blog post will describe the EDI 830 Planning and Forecasting document.  And finally, we will wrap it up with how both the 852 and 830 EDI documents work together.

On another note, the EDI 852 data can be very large if you receive UPC/Store level information.  These transactions can cost a lot of money if you receive the data through an EDI VAN.  Here’s an opportunity to lower your EDI VAN costs.