XML: The lingua franca of e-business

JAKARTA (JP): If every company has its own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, which may have been built based on a vendor's application products, how would it integrate with its suppliers, partners and customers, each of whom may have a different ERP system based on a different product?

Company A may be using a purchase order form that is different from the one used in Company B's system. When Company A submits a purchase order to Company B over the Internet, it may not be understood by the latter's system. How would trading take place efficiently? The same would be the case with other business documents, such as invoices and payment authorization.

Important information, such as company name, product name, product description, quantity of units ordered, terms of payment, etc., may not be placed in the same locations in the individual forms that the two companies use, and this would certainly hamper trading activities on the Internet.

In fact, this is just one of the clear examples that demonstrate how standards can play a crucial role in making things work. The Web itself is based on two standards, namely, the TCP/IP and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Otherwise, the Web would not have become as powerful as it is today.

Thanks to the increasing industry support for another standard called eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the problem may be solved. With this standard, which is still under construction, all the data in the purchase order, for instance, will be encapsulated and will be tagged in specific ways that the recipient can decode them and automatically enter them correctly into its own system.

With XML, no manual data reentry would be required, which means that the probability of human error is minimized, and that is just what e-commerce, particularly that which is part of the supply chain management, requires.

Developed initially by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), XML has been gaining more recognition as the glue that will tie all e-commerce systems together. For this reason, it is not surprising that industry leaders such as Microsoft, Hewlett- Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems have invested substantial amounts of money in building XML capabilities into their products, including their browsers.

XML is not yet finalized, however. The main challenge is that everyone has a different set of data that they consider important and should be in the forms. Besides, there are things that XML will never be able to do for e-commerce, and a new standard may be needed in the future. But, for now, everybody has high hopes in XML.

-- Zatni Arbi