EDI - Electronic Data Interchange
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) refers to the electronic transfer of documents.
The first question that comes to mind is: what kind of data can be processed via EDI? It is data in formats defined by international standards, which allows users of various EDI systems to exchange data in identical formats. Electronic Data Interchange pertains to commercial documents in particular. EDI systems have been created for the purpose of electronic document interchange between IT systems of commercial partners with the least possible manual intervention within the process. Documents sent via EDI are counterparts of commercial paper documents adapted to electronic transmission. The vital feature of EDI (Web EDI) systems is that the formats of the transmitted documents are standardized and independent of the differences characterizing the software used by various companies. Another important point is the adaptation of documents to exchange between IT systems and not between people. The data is processed automatically by the computer and the software, therefore its original form may be totally illegible to people.