ELECTRONIC DATA INTERCHANGE

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) refers to the planned transmission of data between organizations by electronic funds. It is used to transmit electronic documents from one computer system to another from one trading partner to another trading partner. It is more than simple E-mail; for design, organizations might substitute bills of lading and still checks with suitable EDI messages. It also refers specially to a family unit of standards, as well as the X12 series. Though, EDI also exhibits its pre-Internet roots, and the standards tend to focus on ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)-formatted single messages relatively than the entire sequence of conditions and exchanges that build up an inter-organization business process.

In 1992, a review of Canadian businesses establish at least 140 that had adopted a number of type EDI, but that a lot of (in the sample) "[had] not advantage from implementing EDI, and that they [had] in fact been deprived by it."

The National Institute of Standards and Technology in a 1996 publication describes Electronic Data Interchange as "the computer-to-computer interchange of severely formatted messages that stand for documents other than monetary instruments. EDI implies a series of messages between two parties, either of whom may provide as originator or receiver. The formatted data representing the documents perhaps transmitted from originator to recipient via telecommunications or actually transported on electronic storage media." It goes on additional to say that "In EDI, the common processing of received messages is by computer only.

Human interference in the processing of a received message is usually intended only for error circumstances, for quality review, and for particular situations. For illustration, the broadcast of binary or textual data is not EDI as defined here except the data are treated as one or additional data elements of an EDI message and are not usually planned for human understanding as part of online data processing."

EDI can be officially definite as 'The transfer of structured data, by agreed message values, from one computer system to one more without human intervention'. Mainly other definitions used are difference on this subject. Even in this era of technologies for example XML web services, the Internet and the World Wide Web, EDI is still the data set-up used by the huge popular of electronic commerce transactions in the world.