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Understanding EDI
What is EDI?
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) enables the exchange of business documents between businesses in a standardised format.
How does EDI work?
EDI enables companies with different hardware/software systems to exchange business documents in a common format. To facilitate this, a business needs access to an EDI solution. This allows the exchange of EDI transactions with customers and suppliers.

What type of documents can I send via EDI?
- Orders
- Invoices
- Advanced shipping notices
- Dispatch information
Companies also utilise EDI to transmit/translate the following documents:
- Inventory
- Catalogues
- Contracts
Why do businesses use EDI over paper-based management?
Companies have been utilising EDI to streamline their pay to procure process for over 40 years now. Many businesses are still using paper-based management to communicate with their trading partners – an ineffective and time-consuming method of communication.
Paper-based management comes with sizeable overhead expenses with printing, filing, document retrieval, postage, and storage just to name a few.
Manually entering data reduces your order processing speed and doesn’t properly equip your employees to process high volumes of orders efficiently. By automating your pay to procure process your business can receive data and documents within minutes, offering your company better visibility around communications.
The Key Benefits of EDI
- EDI eradicates manual data entry and increases your businesses processing speed
- Ensure brand loyalty by reducing errors and duplication in documents
- Digitalisation offers a time effective method of exchanging B2B documents
- Electronic exchange of documents offers traceability and security for all businesses
- All your EDI data visible on one easy-to-use user-friendly platform
Want to learn more?
Our team of in-house experts have years of experience providing EDI solutions for businesses just like yours. In our latest webinar, ‘Understanding EDI’, they share their expertise giving you a full insight on how EDI can transform your business processes.
Watch it for free here.

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