Re: AW: [ebxml-dev] RE: [EDI-L] Article on ebXML Core Components ...

[Todd Boyle <tboyle@rosehill.net>]

At 01:02 AM 4/23/02, Frank. Christopher wrote:
>Onk!
>
>Following this discussion I (again) get the impression that a huge count
>of people is waiting for the 1001st definition of a invoice and the
>5096th definition of a purchase order.
>
>Again (I expect) we will face the reality that even SME will require
>branch specific information in their documents and will "interpret" this
>or that so or different, will use price including tax and the addition
>of tax and net price will not match the total price and so on.

In the U.S., Quickbooks has something like 80% market share.

How do you explain the fact that such an overwhelming percentage
of small businesses are able to run their company with a total
vocabulary of something like 200 data elements, and a single page
invoice and order?

Frank with all due respect, SMEs will *not* have this problem you
describe, interpreting documents. You are neglecting the facts that
in SMEs there is extreme compression of the roles, and that all
of their buying and selling is conducted manually, by people who
will be dead if they're not alert. They already conducted the sale
or purchase personally and they don't sit and maintain diaries
of every detail in their computer, now or ever.

It will be a permanent feature of SMEs, that most sales or purchases
are conducted by ONE person and that they neither need, nor
desire, detailed documentation, detailed contracts, or step-
by-step business process software.  They just need a way to
make their bookkeeping automatic for cash, inventory, payables,
and receivables.

If large Enterprises have a problem processing a standard PO
or invoice with SMEs that's tough luck because SMEs are not
going to start doing extra keypunching just to make things
more convenient for the Enterprises.

I will concede, if the vision of the UMM, CPPA, RegRep and
BCPMC were realized in a piece of software, and it were handed
to SMEs for free, and it was capable of running alongside the
existing accounting system, they might install it.  The very
first thing they would do is configure it to be limited to their
own context (the SME context of 200 words vocabulary), and
limit the documents support to orders and invoices capable
of being understood by Quickbooks.  This is rather like
giving Maserati race cars, capable of 300KPH to every
suburban family in order to speed up the traffic on the
streets where speed limits are never more than 100Kph,
since they won't buy it themselves...

Todd