Electronic Data Processing (EDP) offers a quick and accurate method for data processing.

Particularly useful to businesses and their users, EDP offers information and insight about their market and industry, as well as customers and competitors.

EDP describes the processing of data by a computer in an IT environment.

This could include the commercial information handled by an organisation as well as administrative records. For instance, for a train company, EDP could refer to the processing of tickets and bookings.

The terminology for it appeared in a time when most computing inputs were manually inserted and provided by a computing device, like punch cards.

Other terms for EDP are Information Services (IS), Management Information Services (MIS), automatic data processing or data processing.

EDP offers rapid processing and analysis of big quantities of data. The reason why EDP is advantageous is that they reduce the cost of paper document management and storage as there is no need for physical storage locations.

In addition, a lot of EDP tools streamline business workflows as they smoothen the process. There is also a collaboration function to track data and information.

Overall, EDP reduces both the need for manual tasks and also the time it takes to complete them, alongside getting rid of bad data and storing vast quantities of it.