RE: Trading Partner or Party - What's in a name

[David Burdett <david.burdett@commerceone.com>]

Sally

This suggests to me that Trading Partner, as far as the EDI community is
concerned, has a more specific meaning than I thought. I can quite imagine
that there could be "TPAs" between an "Intermediate Consignee" and a a
"Trading Partner". Do you think that Party would be a more acceptable
general term?

David

-----Original Message-----
From: sfuger@AIAG.ORG [mailto:sfuger@AIAG.ORG]
Sent: Monday, August 21, 2000 9:05 AM
To: David Burdett; ebxml-transport@lists.ebxml.org
Subject: RE: Trading Partner or Party - What's in a name


In EDI, the Trading Partners are the parties exchanging the document.  Other
parties, distinguished by the role they play, e.g., an Intermediate
Consignee or a Carrier, may be outside of the Trading Partners.  Many years
ago, we struggled with these terms in X12.

Any way, that's my two cents.

Regards,

Sally Fuger



-----Original Message-----
From: David Burdett [mailto:david.burdett@commerceone.com]
Sent: Monday, August 21, 2000 11:31 AM
To: ebXML Transport (E-mail)
Subject: Trading Partner or Party - What's in a name


Foks

We have two names for essentially the same thing - Trading Partner and Party
- does it matter?

My personal view is that there should be one, but which?

For my 2c here are my views on the pros and cons of each:
For Trading Partner:
* Well known term used widely within EDI to identify a company, business,
etc involved in trade
* Implies that commerce or business is involved
* Used by IBM in their Trading Partner Agreement

For Party:
* also a well known term used identify one of the companies, businesses, etc
involved in trade
* does not necessarily imply that Trade is involved.

IMO, I prefer Party to Trading Partner since a lot of the work we are doing
in ebXML, e.g. TRP and Core Components, can be used in a non commercial
context and to imply that it could be used only in a commercial context by
using *might* limit its use. On the other hand:
* the "b" in ebXML stands for "business" so maybe we should be explicit and
accept commercial only use as a constraint, and
* if TRP works, it will be used in none "trade" contexts since people won't
care they'll just want to take advantage of it anyway.

Thoughts?

David


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