The impact of common e-business interfaces

Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce has great potential to create new efficiencies for industries and their supply chains. While Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) over private networks has been used extensively for data interchange among large enterprises, it has had limitations of cost and rigid format specification that have precluded widespread adoption. Further, due to its batched nature, EDI is not well-suited to intensive real-time information exchange and application integration needed for supply chain activities such as collaborative forecasting and inventory management. A number of supply chains now use just-in-time manufacturing processes and require quick access to information received from partner enterprises that EDI does not support. EDI does provide the connectivity and structured data interfaces needed for exchange of business information in one-to-one relationships, but it does not support process standards that would specify how IT applications at dynamic partnering enterprises need to process this data. Data interchange using the Internet infrastructure has emerged as a viable platform for commerce, particularly due to the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) specification for document markup that eliminates the need to find a common application interface (API) for integrating inter-enterprise applications. XML-based dialogs among applications at different enterprises can define business processes between trading partners. A continuing obstacle to widespread B2B commerce over the Internet, using XML documents as the payload, is the lack of business standards that would lay out the document schemas and the conditional choreography of document exchanges needed to complete a business process extended across multiple enterprises [2]. Without such standards, there is no common vocabulary to describe products, there is low visibility in the supply chain as sell-through information is difficult to aggregate, there