EDI stands for Electronic Data Interchange. As the name implies, EDI is used to exchange data electronically.

The motivation behind the use of EDI is the simplification and cost reduction through fully automatic transmission of messages between sender and recipient. For the purpose of standardization, the first UN / EDIFACT standard was published by the UN organization in 1988 UNECE homepage. According to the UN / EDIFACT standard, there are different types of messages that use predefined structured formats.

This standardization enables the uniform communication as well as the semantic understanding of the messages between the partners. These EDI messages themselves usually have to be converted into the EDI format by the sending partner. For this you need a mapping tool. The same thing has to happen on the receiver side, only in reverse of the EDI format in its own format, which the receiver uses internally.