Re: [ubl-dev] A 'Lite' Profile for UBL

[Pedro Alves <pmalves@think.pt>]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2004 at 12:55:03PM +0100, Stephen Green wrote:
> Pedro
> 
> Thanks for these comments. The main question is: Did you cater for
> integration with a back-office finance system? This is the main
> factor UBL Lite addresses. Electronic messages have some value
> even without back-office integration but it's debatable whether that
> value would cover the cost of the XML development. What gives a good
> business case is the elimination of rekeying into an existing finance system.
> 
> The point is that finance systems (finance packages) have limited ability
> to process data once it is thrown at them. If my package can only receive
> and, more importantly, store and send back out, discount at header level,
> some clever progamming would be required of the integrator to handle
> line level discount and there is a limit to how much of that clever programming
> a software company can afford to put into its low-end products.
> 
> The most strightforward/common sense answer seems to many to be to
> apply restricted functionality support to the message.
> 
> If you have a better answer I'd seriously think think about patenting it before
> telling us! :-)  But we'd love to hear it anyway :-)
> 
> All the best
> 
> Stephen Green


    Our product was developed to integrate with back-office finance
systems, and currently we modules for Primavera, phc (portuguese ERPs), and
will develop for navision, sage, etc in short term. 


    From my experience, knowing at least a bit of how this ERPs work, I
cannot think of a UML subset that satisfies all of them and would still
work in other countries. Our method is to develop a xml schema that has
only the things we want to map and with a xsl make a transformations or
build a class to work with the UBL message itself. The decision depends on
how the ERP works.


    And the input is different from project to project. We have modules for
EDI, eBIS and xCBL. This "modules" are just stylesheets or classes that
transform this languages to UBL.


    Having every message transformed to UBL makes our package able to do
more that just "store and send". We can apply simple (and not that simple)
rules that can overcome the limitations of the back-end systems. 


    I didn't patent it but it's done, so if you want it we can talk :)


    Cumps

    Pedro

-- 
Pedro Miguel G. Alves       pedro.alves@compta.pt
COMPTA - Parceria e Tecnologia      www.compta.pt
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