B2B Data Integration and Transformation Blog

Despite being more than six decades old, EDI has remained the foundational model of electronic business-to-business integration. The widespread adoption of EDI standards has enabled trading partners across various industries to communicate and exchange documents through pre-determined and pre-aligned digital formats and protocols. With EDI, enterprises have created ecosystems where data flows seamlessly from one end to another, accelerating transactions and minimizing errors in business-critical processes.

Recent supply chain disruptions have fueled a dramatic rise in demand for more agile and adaptable EDI integrations. Today, trading partners want to interact in an ecosystem that guarantees fast and reliable data transfer, regardless of the data hosting infrastructures they use.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a long-standing technology with a history spanning over 60 years. Over the years, it has transformed, evolved, and faced fierce competition, yet it has remained the most dominant utility for B2B communications. Despite the proliferation of internet-enabled transactions, businesses across numerous industries still develop and maintain their systems around EDI standards. In 2019, EDI accounted for 78.4% of all B2B electronic transactions.

The COVID-19 outbreak had a profound near-instantaneous impact on business operations globally. Within the weeks that followed, enterprises came to the painful truth that their supply chains were not as reliable as they thought. As a result, buzz words like "just-in-time" and "make-to-order" were quickly thrown off the wagon, with many businesses struggling to stay afloat and some suspending operations altogether.

Traditionally, most companies deployed digital integration solutions in an enterprise-centric manner that prioritized connecting business units to internal applications and business partners through standard EDI technologies. As a result, integration happened from the "inside-out", with internal systems dictating the level and extent of connections with external systems.