What is ALE/EDI?

ALE (Application Link Enabling) and EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) are related technologies used for electronic data exchange. EDI is a standardized format for exchanging business documents (like purchase orders or invoices) between organizations, often using specific communication protocols. ALE, primarily within the SAP ecosystem, provides the technical infrastructure and middleware to facilitate the exchange of these EDI documents between SAP systems or between SAP and non-SAP systems. ALE leverages IDocs (Intermediate Documents) as its data container format, which can be mapped to EDI standards like ANSI X12 or EDIFACT. In essence, ALE handles the technical aspects of transmitting the data, while EDI defines the standardized format of the data being transmitted. They're often used together to automate business processes and reduce manual data entry.