文章基本信息

标题：Supply Chain's Connected To … - Industry Trend or Event
作者：Dan Miller
期刊名称：The Industry Standard
印刷版ISSN：1098-9196
出版年度：2001
卷号：July 2, 2001
出版社：IDG Communications

Supply Chain's Connected To �� - Industry Trend or Event

Dan Miller

... THE ERP SYSTEM, CRM APPS AND JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING ELSE THESE DAYS. HERE'S HOW, IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS, ONE TRANSACTION MIGHT WEND ITS WAY THROUGH THE MODERN BACK OFFICE.

THE INTEGRATED ENTERPRISE GETTING YOUR BACK OFFICE TO TALK TO YOUR FRONT OFFICE.

Companies implementing supply chain, customer relationship and enterprise resource planning systems face two big challenges: How do you get those systems to work together? And how do you connect those systems to outside suppliers and business partners?

The easy answer to the first question is to buy a suite. Oracle, SAP and other back-office giants all sell e-biz-in-a-box products, with ERP, SCM and CRM modules designed to interoperate from the get-go.

But most businesses prefer a best-of-breed approach, buying separate, standalone products. Most e-biz apps come with application programming interfaces (APIs) that give other programs well-defined ways of speaking to them. APIs have one drawback: They're designed to facilitate communications between Application A and Application B. When you add Application C, D and E to the mix, getting all those APIs to line up correctly becomes awfully cumbersome. Hence, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI). This software breaks down a complex business process into a series of transactions between apps. It then brokers those transactions in language each app can understand.

Connecting your back office to the outside world can be even tougher. For years, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) has been the lingua franca of interbusiness communication. While EDI is good at transmitting orders and invoices, it's not so good at more complex exchanges, like changing product descriptions or transmitting product drawings. Extensible markup language (XML) helps solve that problem. XML is built for the Net, making it good for intercompany communications. It's also flexible: While EDI data structures are set in stone, XML lets you change them on the fly. Fortunately, most EAI products speak XML, so you can integrate your apps and open them up to the outside world at the same time.