Electronic Data Interchange

EDI - the inter-organization exchange of well-defined business transactions in standardized electronic form directly between computer applications. Focused on Business-To-Business community. Also, EDI can be stated as collection of standard message formats to exchange data between organizations computers via any electronic service.

Domains EDI covers: traditional business facets: inquires, planning, purchasing, acknowledgments, pricing, order status, scheduling, test results, shipping and receiving, invoices, payments, and financial and business reporting. Additional standards: interchange of data relating to security, administrative data, trading partner information, specifications, contracts, distribution..

EDI History

• Electronic transmission started during 1960s.
  
• Initially main focus was for road and rail transport industries.
  
• In 1968, the United States Transportation Data Coordinating Committee (TDCC) was formed. This committee coordinated the development of translation rules among existing four sets of industry-specific standards.
  
• Later, the X12 standards of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) gradually extended and replaced industry-specific standards created by the TDCC.
  
• U.K. Department of Customers and Excise also came up with standards for documents that need to be used in international trade. These were futher extended by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) as GTDI (General-purpose Trade Data Interchange)
  
• A United Nations Joint European and North American working party (UN-JEDI) addressed the harmonization between the two sets of standardized documents. They developed EDI and came up EIFACT, a document translation standards for administration, Commerce, and Transport. Today, EDI messages are coded in a standard data format based on X12 and EDIFACT specifications.
  

As we speak,

• EDI technology has matured.
  
• EDI has been growing in the past, although the penetration is still low.
  
• In spite of its moderate success, EDI has failed to gain total acceptance and become ubiquitous in industry.
  
• Although EDI technology works well, until now this technology has been expensive to implement.