Integration of electronic data interchange: a review

The implementation of electronic data interchange (EDI) has been claimed to be vital for the success of international trade, as it requires bundle of data exchanges between many parties across geographical boundaries. Numerous literatures have argued that EDI could yield enormous benefits provided that there is integration into other business applications as well as with company’s trading partners. Nevertheless, due to many barriers during the implementation process, EDI often stagnant with a single set of transactions without further integration. On the other hand, literatures revealed further that most of the companies that were imposed by government or larger trading partners to implement EDI are reluctant to integrate it into other business applications. This paper discusses EDI integration by referring to its benefits, inhibitors and determinants based on the literatures and findings of the preliminary works. Accordingly, a research model has been built where the effectiveness of the model is demonstrated by the development of thirteen propositions that could be tested in practice.