semweb2slide15
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Fast forward to today’s world of Web Services. Companies in competitive industries like electronics are beginning to publish business services (e.g., place an order, make a payment, track a shipment) that others can discover in registries, integrate into their own processes, and publish new services that others can build on. With critical mass, business services are expected to grow explosively like the Web itself.
Prior to Web Services, companies that wanted to integrate their business processes had to resort to expensive custom integration or EDI solutions. These could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take months of time to implement. Such solutions made good business sense for, say, an IBM and Ingram, who do a billion dollars a year of business together. However, they did nothing for the 10,000 or so small and medium size companies that comprise the bulk of the electronics industry value chain.
With Web services, a company can publish on its Web server its products, prices and availabilities, shipping and production schedules, etc., in a form that both people and machines can understand. With such information, it suddenly becomes feasible to optimize forecasting, production planning, inventory management and other ERP-like functions across an entire industry, rather than just within a single enterprise.
