Uncle Sam Likes Small Businesses

DLA aimed its EMall requirements particularly at small businesses with minimal e-business resources, but who provide a significant level of support to the U.S. armed services. Specifically, the EMall project (www.emall.dla.mil) is designed to offer the four major military services ”Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines ”a single requisition system for common parts and replenishable supplies .

The project created two proof-of-concept systems to demonstrate how small vendors can be quickly integrated into a larger central system, and to provide a distributed information grid to supply real-time catalog information without prohibitive performance overhead. From the original base syntax came an advanced version that supports completely scalable and dynamic information exchange for CatXML points-of-presence. A flexible "smorgasbord" approach allows trading partners to implement matching profiles quickly and effectively with both inbound and outbound information exchange, using the information server approach as its foundation. This approach is the ebXML idea in action, addressing real business issues.

An important goal for DLA is to provide a vendor-neutral specification founded in XML syntax that can be freely implemented. Since XML Global Technologies (www.xmlglobal.com), the system developer, and DLA are not vendors of proprietary catalog services or solutions, they have no particular axe to grind. As a result, catalog developers gain the advantage of using proven designs of components and methods , while at the same time being able to locally customize these components and methods to their specific industry base. The potential payoffs of CatXML come from its interoperability and cost savings across a broad spectrum of marketplaces . Figure 9.1 illustrates these items in the CatXML conceptual delivery architecture.

Figure 9.1. CatXML conceptual delivery architecture.