| # Electronic Data Interchange Electronic data interchange (EDI) is used to exchange business documents between two systems. For example, a customer sends a purchase order to a supplier through EDI after which the supplier responds by sending an invoice to the customer electronically. Therefore, EDI eliminates the transfer of paper copies of business documents. Many external standards of these business documents are defined that provide rules to the related business processes, the business document structure, and the content. In Europe, the UN/ EDIFACT standard is used; in the United States, the standard is called ANSI. Moreover, industry-specific standards are also used. For example, SPEC2000 and AECMA for aerospace and defense, and VDA/ODETTE in the automotive industry. LN has its own internal standard, called BEMIS (Baan Electronic Message Interchange System). LN uses the BEMIS standard to generate and read messages. All external standards can be translated into the internal BEMIS standard or generated from BEMIS by an EDI translator, which uses standard EDI message formats that are supported by your business partners. The following figure illustrates the development of the various standards: Related topics An overview of BEMIS Implementing EDI Using external EDI Using internal EDI |