What is EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)?
Turkish: EDI
EDI lets companies exchange orders, invoices, shipment notices, and inventory messages between systems in standard formats.
What is EDI?
EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is the system-to-system exchange of business documents in standard electronic message formats. Purchase orders, shipment notices, invoices, inventory updates, and price lists are sent through agreed structures instead of email attachments.
How Does It Work?
Trading partners define the message types, fields, code lists, and communication channel they will use. Data from an ERP or accounting system is transformed into an EDI format, sent through a secure channel, and processed automatically by the receiving system. EDIFACT, ANSI X12, and UBL are standards used in different contexts.
The hard part of an EDI project is not just sending a file. It is aligning two companies’ business rules. Product codes, units, tax values, delivery addresses, and error responses must mean the same thing on both sides.
Difference from APIs
An API can provide real-time request-response communication. EDI is often used for batch-oriented, standardized document exchange. It remains common in retail, logistics, and manufacturing networks because it connects many suppliers through shared message structures.
Business Use
With ERP integration, EDI removes manual file entry from order intake, shipment notices, invoice matching, and inventory reporting. A reliable setup needs test scenarios, error queues, resend logic, and traceability screens so operations teams can see what happened to each document.
Related Terms
An API is a contract that lets software systems request approved data or actions from one another through documented endpoints.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)ERP manages finance, inventory, sales, production, HR, and supply chain processes through a shared enterprise data model.