The Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) is a membership based not-for-profit organization chartered in 1979 by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to develop uniform data standards and specifications for cross-industry electronic exchange of business transactions. ASC X12 provides a neutral environment and an appropriate structure to foster data standards development and implementation. The ASC X12 body meets each year to develop and maintain EDI standards that facilitate electronic interchange relating to business transactions such as order placement and processing, shipping and receiving information, invoicing, payment and cash application data, and data to and from entities involved in finance, insurance, transportation, supply chains and state and federal governments.

The Voluntary Inter-industry Commerce Standard is used by the general merchandise retail industry across North America. It is a subset of the ANSI ASC X12 national standard.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was enacted by the U.S congress in 1996. A key component of HIPAA is the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans and employers. The standards are meant to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the North American health care system by encouraging the widespread use of EDI in the U.S health care system. The HIPAA EDI transaction sets are based on X12.

This consists of a consortium of major computer, consumer electronics, semi-conductor manufacturers, telecommunications and logistics companies working together to create and implement industry-wide, open e-business process standards. RosettaNet document standard is based on XML and defines message guidelines, business processes interface and implementation frameworks for interactions between companies.

X12 Devised the standards to deal with transactions such as purchase-order placement, order processing, shipping, invoicing and payments.

The paper documents related to particular business activities are mapped into a transaction set.

The x12 Standard defined a set of documents, referred to as transaction sets, for a wide range of business transaction forms. Each transaction set is given a numeric code which is similar to the way in most of the paper forms where form numbers are assigned.