Updated on: April 16, 2026
Previously in our blog, we talked about electronic data interchange (EDI) in general, outlining its advantages, different formats, why it is important, and how it is used.
In this blog, we will look at the most common challenges businesses face when working with EDI today and how they can be resolved.
As we discussed in our previous blogs, EDI has for decades been a cornerstone of B2B integration. Many organizations continue to rely on it to exchange business-critical data with customers, suppliers, and partners. However, while EDI remains important, most businesses now need more flexible connectivity beyond traditional EDI alone. In fact, EDI often comes with issues and challenges that can become a major operational burden for companies relying on it. So, we decided to list the most common challenges companies can encounter while working with EDI. This article also explains practical ways to address those challenges. Thus, this article will be a useful guide for those who are about to dip their toes into EDI and a piece of advice for those who are already dealing with the limitations of traditional EDI and want to improve the efficiency of their B2B integrations without making significant changes to their existing IT setup.
1. You have a complex B2B Network
As trade has become increasingly global and interconnected, many businesses have found themselves in a situation where their partner networks and ecosystems have become more complex, involving cooperation with more partners than before. Among those are suppliers, manufacturers, freight forwarders, and many more, making the list nearly endless.
This means that all those parties should be able to connect with all necessary stakeholders and send them data electronically, preferably in near real time, to stay efficient and profitable.
To establish the required connectivity, companies need to be able to understand each other’s data formats and be able to work with the systems in place. The problem with EDI is that it has many dialects, which create data-flow-specific requirements. This leads to extra work when translating the data from the format you receive into the format you need, and vice versa for your partners. Not to mention, traditional data exchange via EDI is often far from real time.
2. The volumes of EDI are growing
More trade and more partners will lead to a growing volume of data you generate and information you need to share with your ecosystem.
You will have to think of how to connect with specific systems, how to improve the quality of the data, how secure it is to share data with your stakeholders, and whether you have the resources to handle all EDI-related tasks in-house.
Today, the challenge is not only transaction volume, but also the growing expectation for faster onboarding, better visibility, and smoother interoperability across different systems and platforms.
3. There are errors and missing fields in EDI
Avoiding errors and missing fields in EDI messages is difficult, especially when you start to deal with bigger volumes.
Some older formats of EDI such as EDIFACT or IMP were not designed to be human-readable, therefore catching and fixing errors can be challenging. Even when it’s possible to read the information, manual error detection is time-consuming and expensive and can still result in errors.
Automating error detection can significantly increase productivity and increase gross margins.
In addition, automated validation against business rules can help identify missing fields, formatting issues, and incorrect values before the message reaches your partner or causes downstream problems.
4. The cost of EDI is skyrocketing
Owning software and hardware for EDI transactions requires substantial financial resources. Also, in-house maintenance is necessary, so you have to dedicate an IT team with knowledge of EDI. The growing volumes of data and flaws in data quality also result in additional costs.
To reduce the costs, you may want to look into alternative solutions for handling your EDI transactions. For example, outsourcing it to a vendor that can run the transactions in the cloud will significantly lower your costs.
The cost challenge is not limited to infrastructure alone. It also includes partner onboarding, mapping work, maintenance, exception handling, and the internal time spent managing integrations across multiple systems.
5. EDI transactions must happen in real-time with more transparency
The speed of receiving information is critical for transparency. It can influence your productivity, efficiency of processes, costs, and customer satisfaction.
Improving communication and transparency with your partners will help everyone in the value chain to optimize operations and support one another better.
While classic EDI processes were often built for batch-based communication, many supply chain operations now require faster and more transparent data exchange. Businesses increasingly expect status updates, confirmations, and exceptions to be shared with minimal delay.
6. Your partner can’t understand the format you’re using
There are many different formats in use, such as EDIFACT, ANSI, X12, TRADACOMS, XML, JSON, IMP, CSV, ODETTE, VDA, VICS, HIPAA, EANCOM, ebXML, UBL ja RosettaNet, in-house formats, and national standards just to name a few.
The chances that some of your partners are using a format that your systems cannot understand are high, so you need to have a solution in place that can translate the information into a format that your systems can understand.
This is an overwhelming task that can be fixed by adapting to a data integration solution that can map the information from the document sent and translate it to the preferred format.
This is one of the main reasons why companies are increasingly looking beyond traditional point-to-point EDI and toward more flexible data connectivity solutions that can handle both EDI and API-based integrations.
7. Security concerns
EDI is well-established and used across many organizations and industries. Nevertheless, there are still concerns regarding information sharing with partners.
Such concerns are the lack of trust, the risk of the information being exploited due to breaches in security, as well as potential legal and compliance issues caused by industry-specific or governmental regulations.
As data exchange becomes more distributed across cloud applications, partner ecosystems, and external platforms, companies also need to ensure that data handling, access control, and auditability are properly managed.
The solution to deal with the EDI challenges
To deal with the different data formats issue, you will have to have a solution capable of translating all the data flows on the fly. Preferably one that will be scalable enough to keep up with the pace of your business network expansion and work with the data in near real time.
The most common solution to address this challenge is the so-called Turnkey iPaaS (integration platform as a service). Apart from process automation, data translation and harmonization, and bridging the gap between EDI and API worlds, iPaaS solutions are pretty flexible. So adding new partners and scaling the solution will not be another challenge for you. Plus, the Turnkey approach is what gives you the freedom of not having to maintain additional hardware or software licenses, as well as managing an additional team of integration experts possessing the knowledge and skills in EDI, which results in significant cost savings.
Relying on iPaaS, you can not only automatically deal with unexpectedly growing volumes of information and address data transactions to be exchanged but also eliminate possible flaws in the data quality and, of course, concerns about the security of your data and systems.
The strongest solutions do not treat EDI as an isolated capability, but as one part of a broader data connectivity strategy that also supports APIs, modern applications, cloud platforms, and partner-specific workflows.
How do we solve these EDI challenges?
Coneksion (formerly Youredi) is the leading provider of data connectivity solutions for logistics and global supply chains. Our ultimate goal is to simplify how you deal with your data flows, including EDI transactions, and minimize your costs.
Managing connectivity
First of all, we enable connectivity with all your partners regardless of the systems or applications that they use. Our solutions can handle challenging business-to-business integrations, such as getting data from behind firewalls, connecting on-premise systems, or connecting legacy systems with modern applications.
Decreasing EDI costs
Utilizing our EDI services means that you do not need to own software or hardware, but all your transactions will happen in the cloud. This means that you only pay for the setup and the data that you actually transfer.
More data doesn’t have to drive up the costs
As mentioned above, the growing amount of data has a negative effect on your costs. As we understand that the volumes can become overwhelming, we created a pricing model that is beneficial even for organizations that deal with millions of EDI transactions daily.
Improving data quality
To ensure that your data is flawless, we can set up the logic for you that validate all the data against your business rules. You won’t need to do manual error detection anymore, and therefore you’ll receive the information faster.
We can handle any EDI format
Our solutions can understand any data format and translate it to your preferred format while transferring the data to you or to your partners. Rapidly transforming the data will help you to process the information better and faster.
In addition, we help businesses connect EDI-based processes with modern API-driven ecosystems, making it easier to support customers, carriers, suppliers, and technology partners through a single connectivity approach.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2018. It was updated on April 16, 2026, to reflect the most current information. Andrei Radchenko contributed to this story.
