4 Pillars Of EDI

The progression of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) since its early adoption in the 1970s is one that is marked by advances in technology that have made the adoption of EDI easier and in some respects more palatable by companies in numerous industries and of broad sizes, from large enterprises to small owner operated organizations. The core benefits of EDI that first pushed the technology into the enterprise world focused on reducing costs of processing largely paper-based transactions while also striving to streamline communications and provide for a standardized means of exchanging data between companies. The first major shift in technology that spurred increased adoption came in the early 1990s when EDI companies began to pioneer the concept of integrated EDI; through integration, EDI could be moved quickly and efficiently into a company's back-end system, bypassing manual data entry procedures, minimizing errors and greatly improving transaction processing times. Integrated EDI provided for significant cost savings that allowed organizations to repurpose staff and speed up their ability to process transactions, allowing for the promise of cost savings of EDI to be fulfilled at a greater volume and by an increased number of organizations. Since the mid 1990's, integrated EDI has become the leading methodology for deploying the technology, becoming a nearly mandated requirement for any organization that has adopted EDI to any serious degree.