The Relevance of EDI for e-Business today A critical Evaluation Essay

The Relevance of EDI for e-Business today A critical Evaluation - Essay Example When organizations implement EDI in payment of employees, especially in companies and banks, this institution uses the term FEDI (Financial Electronic Data Interchange) (Schneider 2013, p. 138). For business managers, with the current use of extranets, intranets, digital currency, and electronic catalogues, they should acknowledge EDI’s relevance for e-business today. However, implementation of EDI in business organization not only brings positive impacts, but it also has some negative impacts, which can cause negative effects to users who are using recent versions of documents instead of a business partner (McGrath 2010, p. 76). The aim of this report is to enlighten business owners the relevance of EDI in e-business today. EDI is the electronic communications or exchange of business transactions between business organizations. It entails computer-to-computer communications directly to order systems and vendor databases. In the year 1996, the NIST defined EDI as a computer-to-computer transaction of severely formatted information representing documents rather than financial instruments. It means exchange of a series of messages between two or more parties, whereby one serves as a sender and the one a receiver (Zainol 2009, p. 256). The originator transmits the formatted data that represent a document to the receiver through physical transportation on electronic media storage such as CDs or USB Flash disks or via telecommunication (Zekos 2008, p. 67). Despite the relative advantages of EDI, most business organizations still have challenges in implementing EDIs in their operations. However, the entire process of implementing EDI is complex and this is the reason why there is still a large group of organizations that uses the traditional mode of transmitting transactions (Zainol 2009, p. 259). In addition, the process of