Today more than 85% of all electronic business transactions take place utilizing Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). This creates major competitive advantages for businesses and their partners. The EDI process has proven to be the most efficient and secure process to exchange business documents globally. EDI is a necessary component to ensure that your organization is achieving operational excellence.
What is EDI?
Electronic Data Interchange is the computer-to-computer exchange of business documents in a standard electronic format between business partners. By moving from a paper-based exchange of business document to one that is electronic, businesses enjoy major benefits such as reduced cost, increased processing speed, reduced errors and improved relationships with business partners.
EDI provides a safe, reliable, secure, and established method of exchanging documents for all industries. The retail industry uses EDI documents such as the Purchase Order and Invoice. The healthcare industry relies almost entirely on the HIPAA healthcare claim and corresponding payment EDI documents.
Why is EDI Necessary?
The adoption of electronic data interchange is critical for companies of all sizes to maintain their competitiveness in the marketplace. Over three decades of global usage has proven that EDI improves operational efficiency across your entire organization.
As an automation technology, EDI delivers core business benefits:
- Saves time and money: automates a process previously manually executed with paper documents.
- Improves efficiency and accuracy: data-entry errors are eliminated.
- Improves traceability and reporting: electronic documents can be integrated with a range of IT systems to support data collection, visibility, and analysis.
- Improves relationships with your customers: enables efficient transaction execution and prompt, reliable product and service delivery.
EDI is important to both large and small businesses. For large organizations, EDI enables standards to be instituted across trading partners to consistently achieve benefits. For smaller organizations, adherence to EDI offers greater integration with larger firms that have big budgets and strong influence.
Metalanguages like XML, JSON, and API integration complement, rather than replace EDI. Companies must be ready to handle an ever-increasing number of document formats and transmission options.
Why choose Etlworks for EDI Integration?
Etlworks allows your team to easily automate the handling, process, and integration of your electronic data exchange information. You’ll increase your organization’s communication, customer service, and cash flow by automating your processes.
With Etlworks, you can automate data flows that generate EDI messages from internal data or process incoming EDI messages and integrate them with your internal applications and databases, improving process control.
The EDI connector in Etlworks Integrator contains components that convert messages between EDI and XML and vice versa.
Etlworks supports numerous EDI formats — HL7, EDI X12, EDIFACT, FHIR, JSON, Flat File, CSV, Delimited, XML, AVRO and more.
EDI is only the tip of what we have the capability to handle. If you’d like to learn more about how we can streamline your EDI software integration, request a personalized demo from an Etlworks expert.
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