The Inovis Blog

The international language of commerce is standards. Adherence to agreed upon product or service specifications underpins international commerce, enabling trillions of dollars of goods to flow across borders, regardless of the spoken language of any business parties. The common acceptance of standards is fundamental to the success of robust, fair and free trade. Without standards, it would be difficult to imagine the tremendous volume and complexity of international trade.

-Donald L. Evans, Secretary of Commerce, from Standards & Competitiveness: Coordinating for Results

Standards as the international language of commerce is an interesting take and the discussions and input from our customers is consistent with this. The various demands on business which are emerging around extending your investments, minimizing the risk of global trade and the volatility of the market are the surrounding issues that our customers need to manage. The increasing automation of new processes are requiring different modes for integration and different ways to interact; such as web services. These processes require broad support of standards, for both traditional EDI and XML, whether it is interactive web services or batch file based data exchange.

Open Development for Global B2B

Inovis recently announced participation in OAGi, an open source standards group, which represents a core deliverable to the marketplace to support application-to-application (A2A) integration. ERP solution providers such as SAP, Oracle, QAD, Lawson, CDC Software and Infor are key members of the organization and are building core support for these XML documents in their applications. These groups of participants vary by industry. The addition of OAGi to the participation of Inovis is directly related to feedback from our customers and our strategic application partners who support these requirements.
Several key industries are moving to support OAGi requirements as an EDI alternative in Automotive, Aeorospace, telecommunications, retail and global governments. Some of the communities which support OAGi are:

• Boeing
• Lockheed Martin
• Cargill
• General Motors
• Toyota
• Nordstrom’s
• Saks

For a more complete list of communities which support OAGIS’ Business Object Definitions (BODs), you can review a recent presentation online, here.

ASC X12

Inovis continues to be active in ASC X12 and DISA, the Secretariate of ASC X12. Sean Feeney, Inovis CEO and President, was recently elected to be on the Board of DISA and some exciting things continue to be in the works with X12 overall. The organization continues to reach out to the membership to get ideas on how to improve and drive increased adoption of the new messages and the improved versions of the standard.
The leadership of X12 continues to look for input on strategy as they embark on an effort that is very similar to the ANSI initiatives that resulted in the United States Standards Strategy document. This document has changed its title since the last publication so that it reflects and “recognizes globalization and the need for standards designed to meet stakeholder needs irrespective of national borders.” (USSC, 2005) The key themes of ANSI are the “parent” organization are very consistent to the type of themes our customers are seeing, the participants of ASCX12 are evaluating and other standards groups have also addressed. At the highest level, the key themes may be put in the following areas, which are highlighted on the first page of the report.

• OPEN AND INCLUSIVE
• MARKET DRIVEN
• SECTOR BASED
• CONSUMER FOCUSED
• GLOBALLY RELEVANT

ANSI thought access and availability to the information was important and even went as far to print the document in Mandarin and in Spanish, since there is continued cross border trade which is driving many standards requirements both in and out of EDI. If you have some ideas on what should be prioritized, let folks know on the steering committee or you can actively help drive the standards through membership and participation. X12 is also doing some leading work around SOA support with their XML standard CICA, which is gaining traction in transportation. New documents are also being refined for supply chain and government sectors. Healthcare and Insurance continues to innovate with process improvements and initiaives such as real-time adjudication.

VICS

The Voluntary Interindustry Commerce Solutions group (VICS), continues to expand their efforts to support the new requirements of their members as well. VICS has a new AsiaPacific group which is handling their own events and partnering with other geographies as well. In addition to several of their ongoing efforts in collaborative commerce, materials and developing common metrics to help manage compliance for suppliers and retailers, they are also working on the sub-committee on Trading Partner Alignment and Compliance. VICS is additionally doing some industry leading work on how to streamline global transportation and other business processes, which it continues to develop in collaboration with its members.

If you know of an emerging standard, business requirements or industry trends which should be tracked, let us know.