Ricardo,
I was actually the systems architect at Intertrade when we developed
our VAN systems and part of my job was to evaluate new technologies to
determine the future of e-commerce. I agree that nothing is
fundamentally better than EDI as a document format standard. The
various EDI standards represent far more than just a language for
organizing data. The content and organization of EDI documents
reflect the business systems they model, and those business systems
reflect the business processes they model. The EDI standards are
therefore, the product of decades of research into those business
processes that would be extremely difficult to recreate.
The close relationship between EDI and business processes is the
fundamental source of the obstacles SMEs face when implementing
e-commerce and this is why I do not believe that a translation
technology alone could put EDI within the reach of SMEs.
The business processes of a small retailer are very different from a
large supplier. For example, the supplier may have many customers
each with their own contracted discount. They represent a price as a
list price associated with an item and discount associated with a
customer, whereas a customer associates a price with an item. When
the supplier sends out price updates they send the new list price.
The additional data required like contracted discounts may not even
exist in the retailer's database. Resolving these issues requires a
change to someone's systems and that takes time and money.
Knowing the format details of your trading partners is definitely one
of the obstacles to e-commerce. Intertrade was focused on the food
and beverage industry and we found that most companies currently doing
EDI could not provide us with their format details without
considerable effort. Typically the only people who knew how their EDI
systems worked were consultants or someone who left the company years
before.
You have to look at the ROI. Would the savings from e-commerce offset
the integration costs? So far the answer for SMEs in many industries
has been no.
.
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