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EXPERTS (EDI/XML Procurement Enabling Real Trade Standards)
 Jürgen   Habichler
  Project Manager
  ODE  Hauptstrasse 4
Linz   A-4040  Austria
Phone: +43 732 712010 21
Fax: +43 732 712010 12
Email: habichler@ode.at Web: www.ode.at/experts/
 
Biographical notice:
 
Juergen Habichler is in charge of International Affairs at ODE. Born on the 17th of January 1971, Juergen Habichler has a Degree in Business Computing from the University of Linz, Upper Austria, and he was exchange student at the Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh. On behalf of the Upper Austrian Government he conducted a market analysis in Telecommunications in 1994 which led to the establishment of a company called Ooe Datenhighway Entwicklungs-GmbH (ODE). Within ODE he has been in charge of Marketing and since 1996 in charge of International Affairs and EU Projects. From Sept. - Dec. 97 on behalf of the Upper Austrian Government Juergen Habichler has worked as a civil servant stagiaire for the European Commission DG III F6, Electronic Commerce, in Brussels. He is the project manager of several European Union projects, one of them is the EXPERTS  (EDI/XML Procurement Enabling Real Trade Standards) project.
 
ABSTRACT:
 
The EXPERTS Project is an European Union funded Electronic Commerce demonstration project (ISIS I1-03) aiming to implement, demonstrate and validate the new standard and concept of XML/EDI in existing Electronic Commerce services in the European Health Care Supplier Sector.
 
 EXPERTS is a European funded project under the ISIS programme 1998 for Standardisation with a duration of 12 months (Start 1st of January till 31st of December 1999).
 
The mainobjectives of this project are as follows:
 
  •  Integrate, demonstrate and evaluate the new concept of XML/EDI in existing Electronic Commerce Applications
  •  Co-operate closely with International/European Standardisation Authorities/Initiatives (UN-CEFACT, SIMAC, SIMAP, CEN/ISSS) to jointly demonstrate and evaluate XML/EDI standards
  •  Deploy and validate XML/EDI services with a critical mass of SMEs
  •  Demonstrate the benefits of XML/EDI based Electronic Commerce Services in Administration to Business (A-B) and Business to Business (B-B) in the Health Care Sector
  •  Demonstrate the transferability and applicability of the tested messages and documents between different sectors
  •  Disseminate and Exploit this "Best Practise Case" of XML/EDI
 
It's time for a change : A recent development in the field of Web-EDI shows that the combination of Web-Services and traditional EDI services will provide a new and innovative service especially for the SME community which is fast and easy to implement, less costly than traditional services and which enables the SME community to trade with their large business partners electronically. Taking both aspects into account, the quick promotion of those services towards the SME community AND the interoperability of Electronic Commerce Applications, Standardisation plays a major role in the deployment of new standards such as XML/EDI.Thus, the results of this project will provide user driven feedback and validation for the proposed XML/EDI standards .
 
Scenario : Consequently within this project we develop, demonstrate and evaluate new innovative services for SMEs by integrating the concept of XML/EDI in existing Electronic Commerce Services in the European Health Care Sector . The majorTarget Group of the project are SME suppliers in the Health Care Procurement Sector . These results will be transferred to another user group which will be identified at the beginning of the project.
 
Standardisation Bodies and Trade Facilitation Organisations : The project works closely together with the CEN ISSS group dealing with XML-EDI standards and will provide detailed input to the work of this group from a practical demonstration project. EXPERTS also co-operates with the "Ad hoc Group on SIMPLE-EDI and forms & web based EDI (SIMAC)" of CEFACT.
 
Major Results and Deliverables : At the end of the project a new and innovative Web based Electronic Commerce Service for SMEs will be available and exploited. Furthermore EXPERTS contributes significantly to the XML/EDI standardisation activities of some major standardisation bodies (CEN-ISSS, UN-CEFACT, SIMAP, etc.). More than 70 users from two different sectors will test and evaluate three specific XML/EDI messages.
 
 EXPERTS is proud to be a G8 Test-Bed Project within the G8 Initiative "Global Market Place for SMEs" in the field of Electronic Commerce.
 

Note:


EuroStat 1996 shows that there are over 630,000 health care professionals in Europe, approximately two thirds (based on Austria) work in hospitals etc, the rest have small SMEs (eg doctors surgeries, pharmacies etc), which gives about 200,000 health care SMEs in the EU. There are 10,000 in Austria, which would give about 200,000 pro rata in the whole of Europe.

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The EU Initiative Electronic Commerce estimates that 3% of the public procurement budget in the EU (12% of GDP) could be saved through the use of electronic commerce, EXPERTS will go a long way towards supporting this goal.

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This second user group will be chosen in co-operation with the needs of the standardisation and trade facilitation bodies at the first joint meeting and will focus on one of the three following sectors: Automotive, Machinery, Furniture.

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Source ActivMedia, Romtec, in European Information Technology Observatory 97.

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White Boxes: Existing Services and Customers; Dark Boxes: New Services and New Customers to be added in this project

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Some References:

  •  A study of the US Defence Systems Management College reports savings up to 12% of procurement spending through efficient work flow management and Telematics support.
  •  The estimated savings from using an integrated electronic commerce system for supply chains is 0.36% of EU GDP [ref. COM(97) 157] from public procurement alone.
  •  The EU Initiative Electronic Commerce estimates that 3% of the public procurement budget in the EU (12% of GDP) could be saved through the use of electronic commerce, EXPERTS will go a long way towards achieving this goal.
  •  EC document COM(97) 157 states that public procurement accounts for 12% of EU GDP and the Swedish association of local authorities estimate that 3% of the procurement budget could be saved through electronic procurement.

Note:


This second user group will be chosen in co-operation with the needs of the standardisation and trade facilitation bodies at the first joint meeting and will focus on one of the three following sectors: Automotive, Machinery, Furniture.

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The Commission's proposal for the 5th framework programme (1998-2002), EUR 17651, p5ff
 

Introduction
 
Electronic Commerce offers enormous opportunities for Europe. It is estimated that Electronic Commerce revenues on the Internet may increase to 200 billion ECU world-wide by the year 2001 . Furthermore Electronic Commerce will also impact our society and the social welfare.
 
The Growth of the Internet and of Electronic Commerce have been phenomenal. This development has fostered thegrowth of jobs in many related sectors, as well as stimulating global trade more generally. A recent study estimated that 760.000 jobs have been created in the US by the Internet. The effects for Europe could be similar.
 
In Europe there are more than17 million SMEs , that contribute significantly to the European gross product and involve a huge amount of European citizens. Those SMEs are called to face the challenge of global market, and Electronic Commerce gives them the means to keep or improve their competitiveness.
 
Currently the number of SMEs using Electronic Commerce is still very limited . The current Electronic Commerce applications aiming at SMEs are often too expensive, difficult to implement and run and too complicated for them. Thus a large number of SMEs are still doing business using traditional services such as "snail mail", telephone or fax.
 
Industrial demand for this EXPERTS is evident due to the fact that the XML/EDI standards and concepts have only been created and published in 1997/1998. However, in order to ensure a fast take up of these concepts by European Industry a practical demonstration of those standards has to providemarket driven results and further feedback for standardisation bodies .
 
The full potential of Electronic Commerce will not be achieved until the usage of XML/EDI based technologies is more widely accepted within Electronic Commerce Service Providers and the SME community. The impact of this communityon Gross National Product and as a source of new jobs is well documented and therefore raising awareness of modern trading practices and solutions is essential.
 
Current statistics show that the ICT market is rapidly expanding. In the United States, Electronic Commerce technologies and services are already making a significant turnover for ITC companies and a similar evolution is expected for Europe, where only a very little percentage of the SMEs (99% of all companies in Europe according to CORDIS) is using those technologies in their daily business. Consequently the European ICT Industry is very much interested in a promotion and fast take up of XML/EDI based eCommerce amongst SME to foster their own business.
 
 EXPERTS aims to draw upon existing XML work and develops a set of XML/EDI tag definition and semantics for the health care sector and transfer these result to another sector to show generality. This tag set will be representative of many other domains and recommendations on utilising the generic structure for other areas will also be developed. Some work has already been undertaken in developing XML/EDI messages. The aim is to bring the knowledge and experience from those developments together to feed into the new tag set. Additionally the tag set will be demonstrated and it's strength and weaknesses analysed in orderto propose an XML/EDI standard for health care Procurement .
 

Existing and anticipated need for an XML-EDI based Electronic Commerce application
 

A case study: ODE
 
ODE, the project coordinator of EXPERTS , is a very good case study regarding the anticipated need for XML/EDI based Electronic Commerce applications. ODE has offered UN-EDIFACT based EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) services for several years now in different sectors of the economy (automotive, transport, food industry or Health Care).
 
Most of ODE's clients are medium and large sized companies who can afford and manage the technical AND organisational implementation of EDI in their daily business. Using VAN (value added network) EDI services these clients conduct parts of their business (exchange of any kind of business documents such as invoice, order, etc.) electronically with other large trading partners. However, a large number of trading partners are small organizations using traditional means of communication.
 
The following table describes the current situation of a client of ODE in the Health Care Procurement Business:
 
% of Partners No. of messages/ month/Partner Total No. of Messages/Month Total in %
Large/Medium Trading Partner 10% 1000 10.000 50%
Small Trading Partner 90% 100 9.000 Nearly 50%
 
Currently the client conducts his business electronically with the largest trading partners (around 10%) only. An Analysis shows that they account for 50% of the total messages exchanged. The other 90% of his business partners (mainly SMEs) would also account for the same amount of messages if they were able to conduct their business electronically.
 
At the moment the small trading partners cannot justify neither from a financial nor technical point of view the implementation of Electronic Commerce taking into account existing Electronic Commerce Services. Furthermore for the large trading partner the existing dual-mode of handling their business is also very costly. Consequently both parties, large organisations and their small business partners ask for inexpensive but reliable Web-based Electronic Commerce applications. The following figure shows the planned integration of new innovative Web-based EDI services for SMEs.

Implementation of XML/EDI based service for SMEs to existing EDI service
 
 
The Health Care Sector and their business partner are an important employer at European Level. Using adequate open and standardised Electronic Commerce solutions is a key issue for Hospital procurement departments :
 
Benefits for Health Care Procurement Benefits for Health Care Procurement
Lower Hospital Buying Costs Be better provided by local suppliers
Be aware of new procurement opportunities Give Health Care purchasers access to a global market for specific purchases
 
There is every indication from service providers similar to ODE as well as from business organizations that XML/EDI based Electronic Commerce applications are urgently needed.
 

Promotion of Standards and Identification of needs for emerging standards
 
High technology products and services such as Electronic Commerce are very costly to develop, they have a relatively short life scale, and have to be compatible with other services and products. Consequently the usage of international agreed de-facto or industry standards facilitate the development and successful market deployment/market roll out of those products and services. Finally R&D effort can be reduced and the financial resources can be put into the awareness creation and promotion of such services.
 
Referring to this project we anticipate anurgent need to demonstrate the new emerging concept of XML/EDI in existing Electronic Commerce services . Using agreed standards in a market oriented demonstration will provide user driven feedback to the CEN/ISSS working group dealing with EDI/XML. Please find several letters of support from interested users in the annex.
 
 EXPERTS has identified two organisations which are very important to this project in the field of the definition of the XML messages:
 
  1.  CEN/ISSS (standardisation body): One of the Workshops of CEN/ISSS is the Electronic Commerce Workshop which approved to start a pilot project on XML/EDI. This activity is of great interest to EXPERTS . The Mission Statement of the ISSS XML/EDI pilot project is as follows:
     The European XML/EDI Pilot Project will test the role of the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) new Extensible Markup Language (XML) for electronic data interchange (EDI) between businesses and other organizations. The European XML/EDI Pilot Project combines two existing approaches to electronic commerce - XML and EDI.
     The pilot project will explore how XML can be used to provide an interface between existing EDI applications and the next generation of XML-aware applications. As well as developing XML representations of existing EDI messages, the project will study how to create reusable intelligent software agents that can validate the structure and contents of EDI messages and pass appropriate parts of each message to other processes. The interactions involved will be formally documented, using XML, so that they can be shared between applications as easily as the message data is shared.
     The pilot project will also study how the XML Style Language (XSL) currently being developed by W3C could be applied to enable EDI messages to be presented to human operators in a way that takes account of their linguistic and cultural background. It is anticipated that adoption of this approach will lead to the development of simple and lower cost interactive business-to-business EDI applications.
      EXPERTS will closely co-operate with this XML/EDI pilot project.
  2.  CEFACT/SIMAC (trade facilitation body): CEFACT has established an ad hoc working group on simple EDI and forms - and web-based EDI (SIMAC). The aim of this group is to look to all kinds of 'Simpler EDI' and make recommendations. SIMAC defined XML as one of the mayor developments for EDI, making it 'simpler'. But because it was only one of the many developments and SIMAC should look at all, the group decided to propose to CEFACT the establishment of a Global Repository for the translation of UN/EDIFACT in XML tags.
 
 EXPERTS has joined forces with CEN/ISSS and CEFACT/SIMAC in order to establish a sound basis for the three envisaged messages. EXPERTS wants the outcome of the project (e.g. the messages, etc.) to be as much as possible conforming to a standard or to regulations set by these organisations. To ensure this, a close co-operation is essential and has already started. EXPERTS will follow the activities of CEN/ISSS and SIMAC and will keep them up to date of the projects findings. EXPERTS also will provide feedback on the work done so far in the EDI/XML field. In co-operation with the European EDI/XML Project of ISSS, EXPERTS will establish a new CEN/ISSS Workshop on EDI/XML. Thus ensuring close co-operation with other organisations/ individuals.
 

Objectives and Results of EXPERTS

 

General Objectives of the Project
 
The general objectives of EXPERTS are as follows:
 
  •  To demonstrate the new XML/EDI standard in the field of Electronic Commerce
  •  To demonstrate the accessibility and the benefits of XML/EDI applications for European Industries and Administrations
  •  To establish new innovative Electronic Commerce Services for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the Health Care Sector and a second sector
  •  To ensure a user driven approach including specification of User requirements, ongoing user feedback and cost/benefit studies for the Users
  •  To demonstrate the easy, secure and cost effective deployment of XML/EDI services especially for SMEs
  •  To demonstrate and validate a "One stop shop for the provision of Electronic Commerce services" to SMEs
  •  To closely co-operate with International/European Standardisation Authorities (CEN/ISSS, SIMAC (UN-CEFACT)) in order to mutually benefit from each other
  •  To demonstrate the advantages of standardisation in Electronic Commerce
 

Specific Objectives regarding the Electronic Commerce Pilot
 
The specific objectives of EXPERTS are as follows:
 
  •  To set up three XML/EDI demonstration sites in the UK, NL and in Austria
  •  To implement and validate the XML/EDI standards in three existing Electronic Commerce service with 70 Users from the Health Care Sector
  •  To show the transferability and applicability of the results in another sector with 30 Users
  •  To reach a critical Mass of Users: 100 (70 of the first user group and 30 of the second) users by the end of the project
  •  To demonstrate and validate the cost/benefits of XML/EDI applications for the Users
 
Within this project we will demonstrate a set of business activities using the XML/EDI standard:
 
Sender Receiver Message Type
Purchaser Supplier Order
Supplier Purchaser Order Confirmation
Supplier Purchaser Invoice
 

Specific Objectives regarding Standardisation
 
Regarding standardisation the following objects will be met:
 
  •  Definition and implementation of three XML/EDI based messages in co-operation with the above mentioned standardisation bodies
  •  Validation of these messages and the related documents (document type definition (DTDs), etc.)
  •  Identification of user requirements and acceptance regarding the implementation of XML/EDI standards and Electronic Commerce applications
  •  Recommendations and feedback to the standardisation authorities on the relevance of domain scopes
 

Results of EXPERTS

 
To summarise, the envisaged technical achievements regarding the XML/EDI standard are:
 
  •  Definition of draft XML/EDI message set for the Health Care Sector in an EU context
  •  Recommendations / Notes regarding EU tags which have a significant impact/influence for EU member states
  •  Demonstration and Validation of the messages
  •  Definition of final XML/EDI messages
  •  Recommendations for utilising the adopted messages and tags for other applicable domains
 

Beneficiaries and Target Group of the Project
 
Taking the above circumstances and requirements into account the following target groups/beneficiaries of this project have been identified:
 
Target Group Added Value using EXPERTS XML/EDI Electronic Commerce Applications
Purchaser Reach a much higher number of small business partners (suppliers)
SMEs Access to a global market place; Can start benefiting from Electronic Commerce
Standardisation and Trade Facilitation Bodies Will gain practical experience and demonstration feedback from a market driven implementation
Electronic Commerce Service Providers Will gain practical experience and demonstration feedback from a market driven implementation
 

Time Plan of Project
 
The following major milestones will be achieved over time:
 
Milestones Time-Schedule
User Requirement Analysis and technical feasibility April 1999
Specification and Implementation of DTD and Tags May 1999
First Demonstration Pilot July 1999
First User Trials September 1999
Final Service and Final Report December 1999
 

Consortium of EXPERTS

 
In theconsortium are partners from three European member states: UK, The Netherlands and Austria. These three partners represent major players in the field of Electronic Commerce and have a sound knowledge due to their involvement in many national and international initiatives or standardisation activities.
 
Electronic Commerce Platform Netherlands
 
ECP.NL is an independent institution and a public private partnership. ECP.NL helps to accelerate the creation of conditions on behalf of a trendsetting role for Dutch industry in electronic commerce. Participants in ECP.NL jointly deal with the construction, the design and the exploitation of electronic commerce. ECP.NL plays a role as director in this development aiming at four main objectives:
 
  1.  development of the awareness of the importance, the opportunities and the threats of electronic commerce;
  2.  Creation of a facilitary frame for a reliable and univocal way of electronic commerce: the creation of a coherent whole of norms and standards for different techniques and applications and the determination of legal conditions in order to achieve a legally valid exchange of electronic information;
  3.  Recommending, encouraging and supporting appealing pilot projects as well as giving information on these projects;
  4.  Communication on and initiation of research- and development projects which will contribute to design an infrastructural model of the electronic market place.
 
ECP.NL plays a role in the international field on standardisation as the official Dutch representative. Furthermore ECP.NL conducts various European projects, always in one of the four objectives.
 
OÖ Datenhigway Entwicklungs-GmbH (ODE)
 
The "OÖ Datenhighway Entwicklungs-GmbH (ODE)" has been founded in 1995 on behalf of the Upper Austrian Government. ODE is owned by United Telecom Austria (UTA), the second largest Telecom operator in Austria. The aim of ODE is to provide and promote Electronic Commerce Applications and Services in Austria.
 
Furthermore ODE is the legitimised representative of the Upper Austrian Government in the APTA (Austrian Platform for Telematics Applications) and the motor of information society in Upper Austria. APTA is an association with nine members, representing the nine Austrian regional Data-Highway and Telecommunication Initiatives and promoting ICT in the whole of Austria on behalf of the Regional Governments.
 
ODE is active in various EU funded Programmes such as Telematics, INFO 2000, ISPO, Leonardo, Regional Funds and Esprit. On a National Level ODE focuses on the key aspects of Electronic Commerce/Public Procurement, Teleworking and various other issues of Information Society. ODE emphasises very strongly the 10 applications of the Bangemann Report and the thematic programme "Creating a user-friendly Information Society" in the 5th framework of the European Commission for R+D.
 
ODE is the co-ordinating partner of several European funded project, one of them is called WeCAN (http://www.wecan-eu.org). WeCAN (Wide Electronic Commerce Awareness Network of Excellence) promotes Electronic Commerce and defines, evaluates and disseminates Best Practise Examples in awareness creation regarding SMEs.
 
University of Sunderland
 
The Centre for Electronic Commerce at the University of Sunderland has considerable experience and numerous partnerships in this area. They bring expertise from the ELPRO (Telematics AD-1003 Public Procurement for Europe) project which they are co-ordinating partner for. This project works closely with TAPPE (Telematics) and SIMAP (EU) to harmonise electronic public procurement process in Europe. Additionally they are also co-ordinators of the TRADEPOINT (ESPRIT EP-24104) project which is developing a web based catalogue management / integration tool as part of the aims to allow SMEs to actively participate in Electronic Commerce. They also have close ties with a large hospital (North Yorkshire, UK) procurement body, who are involved in developing electronic commerce for their procurement procedures and would make an ideal user site for the project. Additionally a number of other EU, national and local projects are and have been run at the Centre. Other projects include work on electronic commerce within supply chains, electronic commerce applications for SMEs and work on standards.
 

Contact Details
 
For more information on EXPERTS please contact the EXPERTS Project-Management:
 
OÖ Datenhighway Entwicklungs-GmbH (ODE)
 
Mr. Jü Habichler
 
Hauptstrasse 4
 
A-4040 LINZ
 
Austria
 
Tel. +43 732 712010
 
Fax: + 43 732 712010 12
 
Email: habichler@ode.at
 
http://www.ode.at/experts/
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