10.30.06

A part of my current role that I really enjoy is working with our partners, including webMethods, Microsoft, Covast, Cleo Communications, EDISoft, and many others.  We use a lot of their technology in our on-demand services platform — the GXS Trading Grid — but we also resell their solutions to our customers for connecting to us. 

Interestingly, this comes up in my discussions with industry analysts, whom I work with as another part of my role.  I often have to explain the seemingly random array of software we offer to customers.  Luckily, the analysts we work with are deep in our area, and “get it” — but on the surface one could argue that all these offerings are competitive; unless you look into the “fit”.  The reason there are so many different B2B enablement solutions is that there are so many kinds of companies, industries and problems.

For instance, web forms…

 Traditionally web forms is a solution for trading partners that are either not enabled, or those that are using something we really hate — like fax.  Web forms solve the manual input problem for an automated enterprise dealing with a non-automated enterprise, particularly if the non-automated enterprise is not interested in B2B technology. 

But that is not the only problem you can solve with web forms, or even the most interesting.  Another is data quality.  Since the data is being entered via a form, no problem in putting quality checks in.  If you are thinking long term, you may even use a service oriented architecture that keeps the form and the data validation separate so that you can validate data submitted automatically.  In this case, now the forms come into play only for correcting transactions that are exceptions.  This makes it a practical solution (when teamed up with a reliable alerting mechanism), for larger enterprises, because the only form interaction is around exceptions.

But how about a shared view for order management?  Another on-demand service that we offer helps trading partners collaborate on the order management process, which typically involves several transactions (names vary with the e-commerce standard):

• order
• order acknowledgement
• shipment notice
• invoice
• remittance advice

By creating a system that tracks sequences of these and displays any transaction (for visibility) using a web form, we make it possible for partners on the phone to be talking while looking at the same view over the web.  Partners can see the exact same data about how many in flight processes they have (top-level), or how many widgets were shipped on Tuesday (detail-level). 

So how does this relate to one size fits all?  Well, one of these solutions requires basic web forms, another an efficient runtime validation tool, and the last a system that understands process management — but you could describe them all as web forms.  Selecting the right technology for the job is a matter of “best tool for the job”, not “best tool”.

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