EDI transactions, documents and files refer to the EDI messages exchanged between trading partners. EDI transactions are a standardized method for exchanging business documents.
Some of the most common business documents exchanged as EDI messages are:
purchase orders
invoices and
advanced shipping notices (ASNs).
In Europe, EDI transactions are most commonly processed using the EDIFACT or Tradacoms standard.
Although EDI has been around for decades, the number of EDI transactions doesn’t look to be slowing anytime soon. In a 2019 Forrester Analytics report into EDI usage across the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy, EDI sales accounted for £1.4 billion of total B2B web sales and are projected to reach nearly £2 billion by 2024.