One of the major positives that I have encountered is that most of that standard ERP and Materials systems have support for EDI implementations. We are seeing more XML support being added, but when you are making the choice of how you want a standard integration to go, well EDI is a stable standard to go with.

There is a reason that big supply chain players like WalMart and Johnson and Johnson are using EDI. They need their supply chains to work for them, no be a limiting factor for the partners they can integrate with.

EDI is not the most intuitive form of data, but it is for computers to exchange data. I talk spend a good deal of time talking about this in my EDI Primer post series. http://www.theintegrationengineer.com/the-edi-p...

EDI has been around for a long time, and had had many of the “bugs” worked out of it. There is a long history of its implementation, and major players use it. My top three reasons to consider EDI first when implementing a B2B integration.