The newly approved OASIS UBL 2.0 standard and the work of the North European Subset is a major step forward in the development and implementation of document standards for Business-to-Business (B2B) communication. We can now expect to see more and more business systems and Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) taking part, enabling electronic business to thrive as never before.
Changing times for electronic business
One of the most efficient ways to increase revenues is to cut costs. The information revolution has indeed helped organizations of all sizes and types to lower costs, with data hammered daily into computers and kept on storage media. Data can now be looked up, faster, more easily and accurately. This has made the handling and analysis of data, of previously unknown forms and quantities, more practical.
Internal integration and partner data channels have opened up with self-service web sites and customized solutions. The dream of automating sales and transportation handling fully has always been there, and has now been realized by many large enterprises.
However, for many years, the major obstacle for SMEs in realizing more automatic electronic business handling has been the lack of flexible document standards and standards for reliable and secure transportation layer protocols.
Emergence of a common document standard
When businesses conduct B2B communications, the most important factor is their selection of a document standard. This is what has the greatest impact on their cost, since picking a document standard pretty much determines how data is captured from, and injected into, their back-office systems. For smaller companies, it is too costly to implement support for more than one document standard.
For the last several years, there have been so many Business Object Document (BODs) standards based on XML under development that it has been quite difficult to deal with the many choices. The number of document standards available for solving the same problem(s) was overwhelming and confusing and it looked like there was no clear choice. The biggest problem was finding a way through the forest of document standards and trying to pick the best one.
However, after working with the NES Group for the last half year and delving more into the UBL standard I have realized that UBL 2.0 is a merger of pretty much any important document standard I had been looking at for the last five years.