🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <E5v7qE.D85@world.std.com>,
	Joseph H Allen <jhallen@world.std.com> wrote:

>It's time to start "Free EDI".

>EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) is an old
>set of document standards designed to allow businesses to communicate with
>each other.

That is the 'official' purpose. The unofficial purpose is to make work
for all those COBOL and VM types who were thrown out of their old jobs
as Unix and PCs replaced mainframes over the last 20 years. These people
dominate the EDI field right now, which is why they do dumb mainframe
things such as break documents into 80-column records for transmission.

EDI, pure and simple, is e-mail of specific documents in commonly-agreed-to
structures. That's it. Everything else is implementation.

>Typical of the business transactions covered by EDI are
>wholesaler to retailer communications: the retailer sends a PO (Purchase
>Order) to the wholesaler, which then sends the ordered materials to the
>retailer.  Then the wholesaler sends an Invoice to the retailer.

I am deeply involved in EDI and even at the retail-wholesale level,
it involved significantly more than that. There are acknowledgements,
purchase-order-changes, statistical reports, and that mother of all
retail EDI documents known as the Advance Shipping Notice, incredibly
complex but functionally really no more than an electronic Bill of Lading.

>There are two big problems with EDI as it currently stands.  First, the
>standards process is membership based and copies of the standards themselves
>cost lots of money.

As with Unix, there are plenty of different standards to go around. The
clothing industry uses an entirely different standard from grocery
industry for essentially the same documents. And the clothing industry
standard has many different versions in current use.

Getting the standards are not difficult of expensive if you're working
with/for companies dealing with EDI.

Let's say you do consulting for a manufacturer that just landed a big
sale to Target. Target's EDI department will send you all the specs you
need to receive their POs and send them invoices and/or ASNs. There is
enough leeway in the specs that an EDI purchase order for Target can
(and does) look significantly different from, say, a WalMart PO. Etcetera.

>This results in EDI being very non-open and
>inaccessible- supposedly only 20,000 businesses in the US use EDI.

Everyone selling goods to a major retailer (and an increasing number of
minor ones) needs to talk EDI. And it's not just retail. You want to
supply parts to GM? You need to talk EDI.

>The second problem is that EDI is only a high-level document standard, not a
>low-level communications protocol.

Not really a problem. You can transmit an EDI document to anyone in any
form. The problem comes when you need to transmit documents in a manner
mutually acceptable with your 'trading partner'.

If you and your partner agree to exchange EDI over the Internet, that's up
to you and totally possible right now within the standard(s). But most EDI
folk now use VANs (value-added networks, now there's an oxymoron), a handful
of large e-mail systems that essentially talk to each other and nobody else.

Some VANs have announced intentions to transmit and receive EDI documents
over the Internet. Security is an issue, but I see that easily solvable
by PGP as suggested here. But there are other issues; acknowledgements
and auditing trails are important, and neither is done in a standardized
manner on the Internet.

>"Dread" is the feeling any company gets when thinking about communicating
>electronically.

Right now EDI is not a benefit to suppliers. It is a cost of selling
to large, highly-automated companies.

>Free EDI would be a public set of standards (down-loadable for free from any
>web site which wants to carry them) which allow companies to communicate
>with each other either directly (modem to modem or what have you), or
>through the Internet.

Standards are only as good as those who follow them. If the big EDI
players don't play ball with this scheme, it's just wheel-reinvention.
Most EDI users don't care about the standards, they just want to do
business as inexpensively as possible.

A copylefted program to translate, verify, acknowledge, and audit documents
according to existing standards would be a Very Good Idea. VANs are already
moving to Internet-based delivery, knowing full well that the Internet will
render them obsolete. Such are market forces.

But re-inventing the actual standards process, let alone the standards
themselves? Give me a break. In EDI, the only standard that counts is
the one your partner forces you to follow.

-- 
  Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
 Supporting PC-based Unix since 1985 / Caldera & SCO authorized / www.telly.org
 Trains stop at train stations. Buses stop at bus stations. I use a workstation.