Business Document Integration for SMEs in Supply Chains

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are becoming increasingly engaged in supply chains. One of the main technical challenges for SMEs is business document integration: they need to exchange business documents with partners using heterogeneous document formats and integrate these documents with internal information systems. However, there are issues of which standard document format to choose, and how to map those to other data formats using a lightweight approach. In addition, existing proprietary solutions employ manual or custom-made mappings between various formats. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and industrial-strength solution for business document integration. We adopt GS1 XML standard formats for business documents in supply chains as the intermediate format. The proposed solution consists of design and runtime layers responsible for the design of the relational schema to store business documents in internal information system, and enabling the exchange of business documents at runtime with other formats, respectively. The proposed approach advances the state of the art in XML to relational schema conversion by offering a systematic approach for addressing existing gaps. We demonstrate the approach through a case study involving GS1 XML business documents. We have implemented a prototype solution and the evaluation show that it generates operational relational schemas for GS1 XML documents.