Justifications for the Deployment of XML/EDI for Development of Electronic Commerce Applications

Over the past several decades, corporations have invested trillions of dollars in implementing EDI systems with their major trading partners using traditional EDI methods such as ANSI ASC X12 and UN/EDIFACT. While this investment has yielded significant improvements in efficiency and savings, the savings have not been more than 20% of the potential savings, because traditional EDI has been too complicated and expensive for most Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs). As a result, many methods for involving SMEs in EDI have been invented. This paper briefly describes and compares four major of these methods. It shows that XML/EDI method is a more flexible and cost effective solution for business data interchange that can play a complementary role in a peaceful co-existence with traditional EDI.