EDI has been used across many industries for decades and remains the most commonly used technology in B2B process automation.
What is EDI?
Electronic data interchange (EDI) is a computer-to-computer exchange of business documents in a standard digital format.
EDI is intended to replace the manual input of data into web forms and emails. While email is also an electronic method, documents exchanged via email must still be handled by people rather than computers, while the main goal of EDI is to fully automate business exchange.
As EDI documents are processed by computers, a standard format must be used so that computers could explicitly “understand” the documents.
The most common documents exchanged via EDI are purchase orders and invoices. But there are many others, such as shipping status documents and payment documents.
The Benefits of EDI
With a fully integrated EDI system, the exchange process involves no paper, no people, and almost no time. The benefits that businesses across all industries derive from using EDI are the following:
- Speed and accuracy – having no people involved speeds up the processing of documents and eliminates errors.
- Partner requirements – many companies will no longer do business with you if you can’t do business electronically.
- Cost savings – EDI reduces the costs of personnel, supplies, and office and storage space.
- Business efficiency – the benefits of streamlining processes with EDI can have a ripple effect throughout many operations of a business.
- Partners mass connection – nowadays corporations expect a network of business partners – their suppliers, their customers, their logistics providers, their banks.
The EDI solutions we offer
Erply partner Docura (https://docura.net) offers different EDI solutions that are formed on the determination of which processes needs to be automated:
- Retail – EDI for retail transactions
- Logistics – EDI documents for logistics companies and their partners
- Financial – EDI for financial documents that are frequently exchanged between payers, payees, and their banks
- E-com – EDI for e-commerce
Ask Docura specialists (info@docura.ee) how to make your business soft EDI-enabled.