Chapter Fourteen. UCCnet and RosettaNet: Supply Chain Integration Standards

The power of supply chain integration is something we've just begun to understand. Product-intensive companies such as Wal-Mart, Ford, Boeing, and many others all wrestle with the problem of linking to customers and suppliers in real time, providing a mechanism to automate the exchange of information such as orders, payments, logistics, and so on.

We will cover supply chain integration in great detail in Chapter 17. However, we will begin our discussion here by looking at the two of the most significant supply chain integration standards: UCCnet and RosettaNet. Each has its own set of industries for which it is applicable (UCCnet for retail supply chains, RosettaNet for high-tech manufacturing), and each has its own way of approaching supply chain integration, which is even more interesting.

What you want to focus on with this chapter are both the basics of the standards and architectures, and the enabling technologies they employ. Note their similarities and differences.

The need to exchange information between companies has been an issue with product-intensive companies for decades, as we seek to automate the business processes, either formal or informal, between trading partners. The problem has been in the use of common infrastructures or standards to drive these efforts, which eliminate the need for each trading community to create their own one-off solution.

Thus, the recent focus has been on creating standards that define not only how one or two companies work together, but also how entire micro-economies of suppliers and partner organizations exchange common product data in real time to automate business processes and information exchange between hundreds of business entities.

Granted, we have been automating supply using enabling chains for years. The use of EDI is a major cost savings. However, in recent years, we've focused on technologies and standards that bring additional value to trading communities such as

• Catalog services

• Reusable processes

• Prebuilt processes

• Common transport layers

• Transaction capacities

• Legal compliance

• Metadata

Indeed, we are moving toward a world where, no matter what industry you're in, there is a standard that defines how you interact with trading partners. For now, most of these standards including the two we highlight in this chapter are in the category of "up and coming," but that's better than "new and unknown."