How can electronic data interchange (EDI) provide significant benefits to an organisation ? Explain.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the transmission of documents from one computer to another over a network. Some of the benefits of EDI are: It removes the manual keying of key business documents such as Orders, Invoices, Acknowledgments and Dispatch and thus significantly benefits the organization by reducing the labour costs, eliminating human keying errors, faster document processing, instant document retrieval and removal of reliance on the postal service. It reduces paper work and thus marginalizes inherent disadvantages of paper-based transactions such as: cost of stationery and printer consumables, document storage costs, postage cost etc. Electronic documents can be delivered far more quickly than their paper counterparts, thus the turnaround time from order to delivery can be reduced. Electronic documents when printed are much easier to read than copies faxed or generated on multipart stationery by impact printers. Batches of electronic documents are usually sequentially numbered; therefore missing documents can easily be identified, not causing companies to wade through piles of paper.