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OVERVIEW
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is a
communication technology currently widely used in certain industrial sectors
and the commercial supply chain. Traditionally based on the electronic
interchange of administrative documents through a proprietary communication
network (VAN, Value Added Network), it has the limitation that a company
sends the information at a given time and the receiving partner retrieves it
after a certain period, so giving rise to an imbalance or asynchrony in this
communication.
This imbalance, which until recently was
accepted as normal, now constitutes an increasingly important barrier to
achieving total efficiency in the processes of integration between companies
(B2B integrations), as the evolution in the communication networks,
especially Internet, and the ongoing improvement in management processes
demand new, synchronous communication technologies between companies.
There are currently some isolated initiatives
that aim to create generic communication protocols to enable point to point
data transmission securely via the Internet network, but none them, with the
exception of the one described here, provides an integral solution to the
synchronous transmission of administrative documents for a whole community
of users, as their communication is limited to between pairs
(point-to-point) and none of them has a global vision of the problems
involved in processes integration.
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