Enhancing E-Business Applications in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises with XML-based EDI

One of the key advantages of E-business applications is the electronic integration of business processes in order to help reducing costs and speeding up the buying or selling processes. Comprehensive data integration requires application-to-application communication, enterprise application integration, business-within-business and business-to-business communication. For all these demands flexible EDI (electronic data interchange) mechanisms are necessary. While many of the larger companies are already using EDI for their electronic business exchanges, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have to be more flexible and demand a less rigid system. Existing EDI systems do not offer an appropriate solution either for two reasons. Firstly, EDI systems are only semi-standards since there exist many variations for different industrial sectors. Secondly, these systems are very rigid and do not provide the necessary individuality and flexibility. In this paper a more flexible and open solution to facilitate business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce in SMEs and Web-based applications is presented. In order to optimize both collaboration of in-house software components and data communication with other business partners, a configurable interface for EDI is introduced.