Conclusions About ebXML at Work


Although they're projections, these cases reflect realistic business scenarios based on real-life needs. They indicate ways in which ebXML can help businesses meet the new conditions spelled out in the first chapter as well as improve the ways they conduct business for the benefit of the customers and themselves .

These cases have important common features:

  • Small companies. Travel agencies, local retailers, and specialty catalog publishers are primarily small businesses. Yet ebXML provides feasible solutions in each case. With EDI, the companies involved would find it difficult or even impossible to succeed.

  • Ad hoc and high-volume exchanges. The travel agency case uses vertical exchanges and reverse auctions, which create opportunities that can happen at any time; the company must be ready to respond. The running store has an annual plan with periodic updates, plus inventory reports that generate vendor replenishment. The catalog retailer has periodic issues with an indeterminate number of special versions. These kind of opportunistic data exchanges need a technology that allows for quick response rather than a regular exchange of data between long-time trading partners .

  • Business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions. While ebXML focuses mainly on data exchanges between businesses, it recognizes the need to support exchanges with consumers as well. The travel agency case provides an example of that scenario.

  • Multiple industries. All of the cases involve payments, which means data exchanges with banks as well as the trading partners in the supply chain. The running store case also brings in transportation services, and the catalog has interactions with postal authorities. Because of the need for exchanges among different industries, any new e-business framework must squarely address this interoperability issue. In none of these cases would a single industry vocabulary provide the solution.

  • Improve processes or create new opportunities. In all cases, the companies benefit from new opportunities (Go-Go Travel), improved business processes (Marathoner), or both (World Beat). The companies didn't invest in business data exchange to save incrementally from reduced staff time and errors of human processing, but to do business in new or better ways.

Making the case for ebXML requires looking at this bigger picture and providing a technology that lets these visions for better business really happen. Notice also that ebXML technologies are being adopted in a phased way, with the simpler, more immediate aspects being adopted initially, and then paving the way for extended implementations from that base. This also ameliorates the risk factors involved in adopting new technology and new business paradigms . Clearly, smaller businesses will need openly available low-cost components to enable their adoption of ebXML-based systems. In the next chapter we look at XML, one of the key technologies in the ebXML repertoire that can help make these visions a reality.



ebXML. The New Global Standard for Doing Business Over the Internet
ebXML: The New Global Standard for Doing Business on the Internet
ISBN: 0735711178
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 100

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