EDP or electronic data processing is the process by which you can do repeated activities by using computer or other electronic device at fast rate. For example if you take a survey of 1000 pages and want to organize and see the results at one click then you can scan all the 1000 pages by scanner. The scanner usually scans 20 to 30 pages in a minute, may be little more. So if you have a software like Microsoft excel then you can integrate each scan page with each record in excel sheet. So after doing little bit of work you can get each result from one mouse click. Also there is software which can convert scanned pages into text.
There are other benefits of EDP also like you can see updates in stock market. The stock market now uses the same technique of EDP to transfer data from one location to another. As it is electronic transfer so it is ultimately fast then manual data transfer. Other use of electronic data transfer is in accounts department. Now the software is made like peachtree, quickbooks which organize the data and show to users.
The air reservation ticketing system and finding aircraft location is also achieved with EDP. In older days there was only limited software in which most of software was made by the company itself who were using it. Now the ISP (Internet Service Providers) are providing fast speed to connect to internet so the data transfer is made more fast then earlier days.
Popular software product like Ms Office is using EDP concept. Any email client like MS Outlook gets emails at electronic speed but it also depends upon your internet connectivity speed. If you have small email with no attachment then the email will approach you within seconds.
If you set up software in computer correctly then all the tasks are done automatically without your interactions. There are many examples of automated system like web servers, hosting companies etc. Now with the advancement of technology we can store Terra byte of data in our computers and there is much higher security in computers then manually storing data.