EDI replaces sending these documents via postal mail, fax or email which each increase the amount of manual processes involved to different degrees. Even email, which is a type of electronic transfer, slows down the process by adding the manual task of extracting, translating and processing the data from each email. Traditional methods of sending orders and invoices such as postal mail often take around 5 days to transfer compared to EDI which delivers the documents in less than 1 hour. Involving people in the processing of documents slows down the process as a whole and also increases the likelihood of mistakes being made. Instead, EDI documents are sent directly to the relevant program on the recipient’s system, where processing can begin straight away.