Finding common ground
At the heart of Bizevex is the concept of providing a common ground, an exchange, for "business events." These are the information-based actions by one organization that initiate or answer corresponding actions by another organization. For example,
- A purchase order from a company invokes a shipping order and an invoice from its vendor.
- The shipment's arrival prompts a confirmation.
- The invoice's response is a payment.
Each action is a well-defined business event. Both vendor and customer conduct similar transactions with their many other respective trading partners. Leaving aside the differences in computing platforms, there are numerous areas that require prior agreement between the parties. For example,
- I buy widgets by the case lot, but I track my inventory as palette lots. And I sell them to you by the unit.
- What you call your "purchase order" is my "billing authorization."
- I invoice you weekly in US dollars; net payment in 15 days gets you a 18% discount.
- You pay monthly, net 60 days and require a line of credit. In Euros.
Seen this way, the most important issues are not the mechanics of the applications that invoke the business events, nor the intricacies of middleware between them. The truly crucial factor is the meaning of the information flow. That is where the "contract" or trading partner agreement comes in.
One of the clearest, and certainly most detailed, descriptions of how trading agreements are instituted can be found in this IBM whitepaper: