Postal Strikes are good for e-trading

Here in the UK we are now looking forward to yet another postal strike. The Royal Mail workers have decided that to protect their jobs they need to withdraw their labour.

What has this to do with e-trading? Well it's a sales opportunity ;-). The last postal strike was at the end of June. What that meant for a number of companies was that their invoices to their customers, produced at the end of the month were delayed. Not delayed by the 24hours of the postal strike but, because the strike was on a Friday and there were no Friday collections, the invoices were not collected until the Monday, and then the Royal Mail were dealing with a backlog. Invoices arrived not 24 hours late but in some cases over 96 hours late.

For large volumes of invoices some people are now looking at switching from Royal Mail to their competitors in the business postal arena. But if they look at it logically why post an invoice. Send it electronically. In most cases electronic invoices arrive the same day, in some cases we have experience of them arriving in the same minute. If people choose the correct transmission methods (e.g. AS2) then they can even receive an electronic receipt showing that the document arrived on the recipients system (No more "Invoice, What Invoice, we didn't receive it?" from the payments department :-)).

All this and it is cheaper than people and more environmentally friendly.

Damn it this is so easy I think our Sales Quota should double. Better go and discuss this with the Sales Director....

The joys of Business to Business Electronic Trading

We started this blog to bring you all the fun and excitement from the world of data mapping…

We work for a company specialising in the integration of businesses with their trading partners, via automatic exchange of electronic business documents between their systems.

Way back, this was mainly achieved via Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and was always driven by large organisations, such as Retailers, Car Manufacturers etc. They would “request” (force) their suppliers to receive orders and send invoices in very tightly specified data formats.

Since the late nineties additional data formats have been devised such as those written in XML, which, it was believed, would answer all the perceived problems of EDI. These perceptions were typically:

1. Not humanly readable (except for sad geeks like us).

2. Expensive, EDI was sent via a Value Added Network, for money!

3. Different Formats

1. XML is humanly readable isn't it? Well that depends on the standard. For example in SAP IDOC XML, "MENGE" means QTY, and BETRG with a QUALF of 1 means Gross Price…
   
   Of course a different XML standard may use GrossPrice to mean Gross Price!

2. EDI is expensive, but for most of our customers that still use EDI the cost is under 5 pence per document, cheaper than a fax.

3. EDI has different formats. This is true. In the UK and Europe the main formats are Tradacoms (UK Retail), UN EDIFACT (and variants thereof) and ANSI X12 (mainly used by American Organisations). There are subtle variations (e.g. in EDIFACT there are at least 3 ways to define the supplier of a product, or ODETTE for the Automotive Industry, EDIPAP for the Paper Industry) but most of these are still based on the core of EDIFACT. Currently we know of over 500 XML standards, (not 3). The X in XML stands for extensible. This means organisations can be using a standard of XML (e.g. BASDA XML for their invoices) but 3 different organisations will use that standard in 3 different ways…

We are not sounding the trumpet for any format of data though, be it EDI, XML Flat File, CSV or Excel Spreadsheet. We don't care. Our attitude is that the format of data is irrelevant. The driver for information exchange must be the data requirements of the recipient, and that you can send and receive Electronic Business Documents without the need for human intervention. As long as all the required data are present and the recipient system can understand it all, who cares what the transmitted format is?

That is Electronic Trading.