The Background Of Electronic Document Interchange

[Previous] [Next]

The granddaddy of electronic interchange is the electronic data interchange specification, or EDI. In the early 1970s, large companies such as Sears and Kmart pioneered electronic business communication. With thousands of stores and suppliers to contend with, these organizations generated and processed mountains of paper. It was obvious that all this paper was getting in the way of productivity, so methods of electronic communication began to emerge. To communicate electronically with these companies, suppliers were forced to develop and maintain a customized interface for each of their electronic business partners.

By the late 1970s, a committee composed of representatives from the transportation sector, the government, and computer manufacturers began to address developing a method of improving and standardizing electronic business communications. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) chartered the Accredited Standards Committee (ASC) X12 in 1979. Its goal was to develop uniform standards for the electronic interchange of business transactions. X12 was the first of several standard formats for doing business electronically.

Of course, all this electronic business was done over private networks at the time. What would someday become the Internet had begun to develop but was limited to government and academic researchers.

Various X12 committees worked on standards for specific documents—mostly invoices and purchase orders. Each specification had to work for all users in all situations; standards were therefore complex and difficult to implement.

Because of the complexity of the EDI standards, some groups started to branch out and create more industry-specific standards. For example, the National Retail Merchants Association began developing a set of purchase-order message standards for EDI. However, these standards were not well defined and messages were ambiguous, so retailers and suppliers did not use them. The National Retail Merchants Association subsequently chose to support the X12 standards.

This brief history illustrates the two-sided nature of standards: they need to be general enough to be adopted, yet specific enough to be useful.



XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk Servers
XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk(TM) Servers (DV-MPS Programming)
ISBN: 0735611262
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 150

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net