Software—Practice & Experience
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
The model of Electronic Commerce (EC) envisions the ability to send electronically large quantities of business transactions to a large number of sometimes anonymous parties. The EDI standards (ANSI X12 and EDIFACT) provide a framework for formatting a given EDI message, called an EDI transaction. Although the EDI paradigm provides an obvious improvement over the paper world, it suffers from several problems; a major one being lack of flexibility. Introducing a new EDI transaction, or making a simple change to an existing transaction is complex, tedious and time consuming as it has to be first approved by ANSI ASC X12 committee and requires updating of the EDI translation software. In this paper, we propose a simple and straightforward approach based on the distributed database concepts that can eliminate the tedious process of standardization. EDI messages are exchanged through database transactions via a database-to-database communication rather than application-to-application. The most significant outcome of this approach will be that EDI will be transformed from an electronic analog of a business process in the paper world to a process supporting Electronic Commerce.