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Introduction
You are constantly bombarded with jargons every time you read a magazine
or visit a website related to E-business. You may wonder what these
terms mean. You are not alone. This article explains XML and Web Services
and discusses their implications and applications so that you as a
manager can make a long-term decisions.
The Internet enables desktop computers to connect virtually to other
computers and servers connected via the Internet. It is a wide network
which offers the widest connectivity we can imagine. We can use it
to exchange messages, data and information.
Internet Web and Email are the killer applications that Internet offers.
We can send messages to anyone who has an Internet address. We can
view any published document on the World Wide Web with our web browsers
once we are connected on the Internet.
Notice that the web documents or the E-mail messages are initially
designed for human to read. Web sites are designed to interact with
people. They do a good job of displaying information for viewing.
For businesses to truly harness the power of Internet, Web sites and
software must evolve. They must interact with one another to exchange
data.
Consider this scenario, your customers can send you purchase orders
and their content can be extracted into your order entry software
without having to re-enter the data. Your order entry application
then checks the current inventory level and automatically prepares
an acknowledgement to notify your customers of the estimated delivery
date and notify the shipping department to prepare the goods for delivery.
If there are not enough stock at hand, this order information can
be sent to the production planning department to trigger a series
of activities such as purchasing of raw materials from suppliers and
schedule a production run. Customers can track the progress of their
orders.
Depending on the level of automation, your order entry process is
integrated with your customers' purchasing process removing much of
the human intervention. This is one aspect of E-business. There are
other areas of process integration. Some of these benefits include
lowering transaction costs, faster turn around time and happy customers.
You will notice that the whole process involved many parties. Figure
1, illustrates the whole business activities. To achieve full automation
is difficult; we can break down the whole process into smaller task
and focus on each of these tasks. The whole
process is commonly term as Business-to-Business (B2B) Integration.
The key to success in B2B integration lies in the successful process
integration amongst key business partners. It is imperative for organization
to review their business process and move as many processes on-line
as possible. It is also important to consider the capabilities of
automatically exchanging business information through business software?[1].
Such exchanges of business information will foster greater collaboration.
Through this process they can react to changes faster and reap the
benefits of E-business.
Business software in use in the organization is designed to automate
the various business processes in the organization. Some examples
are Material planning (MRP), resource planning (ERP) and Sales Order
Management.. Business processes are successfully implemented in the
software as modules and applications. Business partners such as suppliers
or customers may use different software. Most of these were implemented
before the advent of Internet and integration between these systems
can be very difficult.
Figure 1: e-Business processes
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