Is EDI (exchange data interface) still a thing?
First time posting here, hopefully this is the right place for me to ask.
Father has years of building EDI styff for companies. I'm not familiar with this, he tries to explain it to me, and of course I try to look it up online but everything seems to be outdated or old tech, and still confusing to me.
In my head this is just like an API? Where companies just exchange data?
Is this still relevant? I know truecommerce.com has a service, not sure if it's still a thing.
I've always wanted to build something but can never commit, and my father always tries to get me involved but when I see his tools he builds, it's literally from like on MS DOS format....
Im wondering if there's an opportunity here that maybe I can start something with my pops.
Thanks!
In the industry I work with, EDI is considered the "state of the art" in automating data flows. In most cases, most companies implement it by sending various excel or csv files through email or FTP. Yeah, it's that bad.
In the corporate world, state of the art are the things that are outdated for 20 years. But they get the job done, and change is difficult at their scale, so to some degree I understand it, especially for industries that are not tech centric.
It's still used very widely in the healthcare industry. I used to work a bit with EDI files at an old job (it's how the "explanation of benefits" document from health insurance was sent digitally). I now there are many other use cases of EDI all throughout healthcare.
EDI is rare if you ask me. I have done just 1 project in the past which involved EDI almost 20y ago. We used EDI format to import / export finance data from and to the inventory application that we were building. We used EDI format instead of e.g. JSON because the external applications required support for it. Ofcourse we had to build custom EDI parser and generator (in C#). That's when I discovered that EDI a 'standard' had poor support, because the exiting applications all had a different version of the 'standard'.
I don't expect things are better now, it could be an business opportunity to improve, also because I got the impression that EDI is not as rare when it comes to finance applications, some big players supported that format.
Thank you for your reply.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole industry, if its something that people are just going to do without. I know a lot of big companies still does EDI, but they probably already have something set up for it. I just don't know if there's anymore inventions for it. Perhaps the only thing is just pricing that would beat out competition.