Business System Interoperation (BSI)
- a demonstration of the principles

Description

BSI is a generic tool to facilitate the interoperation between business proceses. There are many ways in which BSI can be used:
  • Mergers and takeovers can leave an organisation with a collection of different computers with business systems that are unable to interact with each other. BSI is a simple way to overcome this problem
  • An organisation may operate different applications and may need to use data from one application  for another application. BSI can facilitate this if access is available to both databases;
  • An organisation may collect data from several of its business systems to provide a data warehouse. BSI enables this to be accomplished easilt and enables any of the contributing business systems or the data warehouse without affecting the other business systems involved.
  • BSI simplifies the sales task of information service providers by enabling information providers and users to use their own formats without having to re-engineer to the service provider's format
  • BSI opens the scope for Business-to-Business electronic commerce. Even Small and Medium Enterprises can participate and overal participation can extend to the majority of trading partners.

    • The Demonstration

    This demonstration shows how customers who produce their Purchase Orders in quite different ways can do business automatically with the same supplier using their existing business systems and without any form of process re-engineering.

    Customer A

    This is a small organisation with just a single shop front. Their ordering system is unsophisticated. They order products and expect their suppliers to deliver to their shop within the normal lead time. If products are out of stock at the suppliers, they will either allow the supplier to backorder or cancel depending on the supplier's normal policy.
    Customer B
    This is a larger organisation with many locations. Their ordering and inventory management systems are quite sophisticated. Their ordering system is capable of optimising the sourcing of product after consideration of quantity price breaks, lead times achievable by the supplier and their current stock levels. This means they will specify the date the goods are required, the location to deliver the goods and the price they are expecting to pay. Irrespective of the supplier's policy on stockouts, the are large enough to demand that if the supplier cannot supply, that line item is deleted from the order.
    The Supplier
    This is a medium sized organisation. They use a reasonably advanced order entry (sales) system on their computer which can cope with requests by customers to deliver to specified locations within a range of dates, to check pricing specified by customers against their discount and contracts records and to either backorder or cancel when stock is not available.

    Operating Instructions

    When you enter the demonstration the left frame will represent the customer's business system and the right frame the supplier's business system. If at any stage you would like to return to these instructions, use the Page Back on your browser.

    In the top frame, first select either the small customer (Customer A) or the larger customer (Customer B) to do the ordering, then click on PROCESS ORDER. This will send the customer's order to the supplier. When the order is received, it will be displayed in the supplier's format in the Suppliers (right hand) frame.

    The buttons at the bottom of the Customer and Supplier frames allow  you to see what happened in some detail. Before using these buttons it would be wise to brush up on  BSI Operation .

    Under the Customer (left hand) frame
     
    ORDER Displays the Customer's original Purchase Order.
    TRANSACTION shows the actual transaction file generated by the Customer's Ordering application program.
    SPECIFICATION shows the BSI Specification which describes to the BSI software how the customer's transaction file is built.
    INTERCHANGE shows the file of orders that passed from the customer's business system to the supplier's business system.

    Under the Supplier (right hand) frame:

    ORDER Displays the Purchase Order received from the customer in the supplier's format ready for processing by the Supplier's Order Entry application program
    TRANSACTION shows the actual transaction file built to suit the supplier's order entry program using the attributes received from the customer.
    SPECIFICATION shows the BSI Specification which describes to the BSI software how the supplier's transaction file must be built to suit the order entry program.
    INTERCHANGE shows the file of orders that passed from the customer's business system to the supplier's business system.

    Now you might like to look at the demonstration

    Created 1 September 2000
    Ken Steel, ksteel@DynamicBusiness.net