Commercial data interexchange such as order lists, shipment, financial records, money transactions, etc made in handwritten form implies than then in future sales manager has to enter these records manually into an electronic database of the partner companies. The whole operation is quite tiresome, bore and takes lots of time which might be spend much effectively. Thus, the usage of standards on electronic document flow helps to avoid those awkward actions which are done automatically with minimal amount of errors and delays in comparison with manual type-re-writing. Employment of automatic procedures increases speed and accuracy of databases and it also give an opportunity for business companies to concentrate preferably on crucial sales matters and not on the accuracy of entered data and questions on execution of special (shipment or orders) paper documents. No matter how a certain company might have had attitude towards electronic document flow EDI can sufficiently help in business handling of the documents and every financial society can attain advantages out of timely and properly organized information on demands and supply on its let out products which altogether can immensely economize ones efforts, expenses which were previously often occurred while manual processing of the papers.
One can easily calculate the final number of official papers on interexchange in case of one transaction in a very general way. For six partners this will be N=6*(6-1)/2=15. For a hundred N=100*99/2=4950. With the growth of the amount of partners of electronic interexchange increases quadratically. Besides, it is necessary to pay attention to communicational equipment and protocols which are used by each member of the system, in some ways they might differ. Beforehand, maintenance of electronic data interexchange scheme in the “vis-a-vis” manner, its accuracy and reliability were an obstacle and required certain expenses and resources. But today EDI system struggles for decreasing losses and financial expenses to minimum rate. But this time every partner’s communicational equipment and protocols are more or less standardized and unified to certain extend and this move helps to decrease efforts in the process of communication dramatically. The number of links is equal to the number of the interexchange partners, and every one of them leads the communication according to universal “rules” which are entering the EDI platform. In this case he does not need to be snowed under the other partners’ protocols and preferences: EDI-provider solves these problems and becomes medium in between those cross communications. In other words, EDI transforms the input signals on one end as input and converts those signals on the other end as output in the way most comfortable for the recipient. In any case the sender and recipient do not lose their individuality and work in the most favourable manner.
EDI also plays crucial part in contentious cases. For example, in a disputable situation between companies one part declares that it sent products specified, but the other part stated that they received none. That sort of situations are not rare, unfortunately, and they can affect the general procedure and take lots of time to resolve. EDI in this case might serve as a referee and outward auditor fixing the situation. It supplies both parties with necessary documents concerning peculiar case in which full information and the whole way of the cargo from the sender to recipient is shown describing each step and medium if any. Provided information helps in finding out true reasons of dispute and can help in meeting all the requirements in terms of financial expenses and responsibilities of the parties. With EDI records that becomes much easier and more trustworthy with less efforts and expenses.
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