Advantages of XML over EDI

Advantages of XML over EDI

EDI adoption has been fairly widespread, even though mainly among larger-sized businesses. The cost of EDI implementation and ongoing maintenance can be measured in the billionsinaggregate. Millions of dollars in transactions occur on a daily basis using EDI-mediated messages. It would be very difficult, if not impossible, to up root all this activity and replace it with exclusively XML-based transactions. These businesses have so much money and time invested in ANSIX12/EDI that they will be fairly slow to adoptanewstandard,whichwouldnecessitatenewprocessingtechnology, mapping software, and back-end integration. For them, it would seem that they would need to discard their existing, working technology in favourof an unprovenandstillimmature technology.

1)      XML is a good replacement for EDI because it uses the Internet for the data exchange.

2) Compared to EDI and other electronic commerceanddata-interchangestandards,XML offersseriouscostsavingsandefficiencyenhancementsthatmakeimplementationof XML good for the bottom line

3)      XML‘s built-invalidity checking, low-cost parsers and processing tools, Extensible Style sheet Language(XSL) based mapping, and use of the Internet keep down much of thee-commerce chain cost.

4)      Theuseof the Internet itself greatly lowers the barrier for small and medium-sized companies that have found EDI too costly to implement

5)      The idea that XML represents a new, fresh approach to solving many lingering problems in a flexible manner appeals to many in senior management.

6)      XML syntax allows for international characters that follow the Unicode standard to be included as content in any XML element