As per a recent research carried out by Forrester Research, EDI is a valuable form of electronic message data format. The figures compiled by the research show that the volume of yearly global EDI transactions have exceeded over 20 billion and this figure is growing. On company’s sides, using an EDI provider can help in tremendous savings depending on the business.

From a financial point of view, benefits of using an EDI provider is that electronic exchange of documents decreases the cost of having them manually processed and increases speed and visibility of actions. There are no expenses associated with filing, printing, paper and document retrieval and this might constitute of a lowered cost by 35%.

Before the information from a company is sent via EDI, it usually resides on a server or a mainframe stored in a database or it might be found in some back-end software application. It is possible to extract data from the outbound EDI transaction and to add inbound data manually or automatically as long as the import and export of files from the application are enabled. Data mapping thus directs what elements of the data in an application go to which files.

Put simply, data mapping is the conversion of information found in one specific location, that is, the data source, into another format to be read by another application which is the destination. In EDI, data mapping converts application data of users into an EDI file format.