Traditional EDI involves the translation of the transaction file produced by an application programs into a specialised EDI "Language" before transmission to the trading partner and translation back to an application file before processing.
The justification of a specialised EDI language (EDIFACT, X12 etc.), if there ever was one, has been obsolete for decades. Second generation EDI bypasses the translation to this specialised EDI language and transaction files are transmitted in their raw state as they were generated by an application program.
The result is the actual transaction data that is moved between the application programs is dependent on the functionality of the business process implemented by the application program which generates the transaction file. The transaction file is tailored specifically to the actual data that is generated by the business process rather than an all-embracing proprietary implementation of a fixed structure used by trad-edi which totally ignores the business process.
Before being processed, the transaction file is reformatted to that required by the processing application program at the receiving end of the transaction.
By removing the translation of transaction files to a specialised EDI language, most of the complexity, cost and inefficiencies of the old EDI approach are eliminated:
Recent research has widened the scope of interoperation from just a second-generation edi into a broadly-based generic solution for facilitating the interoperation of business processes and services. This generic solution is Business Process Interoperation (BSI).