BMEcat, standard of product catalogue exchange

von: Dirk Oder und Leonard Andri

Table of content

1. INTRODUCTION  4

1.1 HISTORY AND BACKGROUND  4
1.2 THE SOLUTION 5
1.3 DEVELOPMENT AND CERTIFICATION OF BMECAT 5

2. TARGET GROUPS 7

3. BMECAT AND XML  7

3.1 XML AS THE BASE OF BMECAT  7
3.2 THE WORKING SYSTEM OF BMECAT  8
3.3 CONTENT AND STRUCTURE OF BMECAT  9
3.4 EXAMPLE OF BMECAT 10
3.5 COMPATIBILITY BETWEEN OPENTRANS AND BMECAT  13

4. BMECAT AND OTHER SOLUTIONS  14

4.1 XML BASED STANDARDS 14
4.2 DATANORM 15
4.3 SAP SOLUTION 16
4.4 MICROSOFT BIZTALK ACCELERATOR FOR SUPPLIERS  16

5. BMECAT EXPERIENCES  17

5.1 ALCATEL  17
5.2 BARDUSCH TEXTILE SERVICES GMBH 17
5.3 PHILIPS LIGHTS 18

6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE OF BMECAT  19

Sources

 

Abbreviations

A2A = Application to Application
ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange
B2B = Business to business
BME = Bundesverband Materialwirtschaft und Einkauf
CPFR = Collaborative Planning Forecast and Replenishment
DGH = Deutscher Großhändlerverband für Heizungs-, Lüftungs- und Klimabedarf
EAN = European Article Number
eBSC = e-Business Standardization Committee
EDI = Electronic Data Interchange
GDD = Global Data Dictionary
GmbH = Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (Limited liability company)
GSMP = Global Standards Management Process
SOX = Schema for Object orientated XML
UBL = Universal Business Language
UCC = Uniform Code Council
VSI = Bundesverband des Sanitärfachhandels
XML = Extensable Markup Language
XSDL = XML Schema Definition Language
 

In electronic catalogue interchange we have more than 160 different standards to support the catalogue exchange. BMEcat is one of the most important exchange standards in Europe. BMEcat is an open source XML based standard, developed by the BME, Fraunhofer Institute, University of Essen and Linz to support the supplier – customer business in the industry. The special in BMEcat is the wide range of supported branches. So it is possible for a company to have a look on all needed products and services to run the business, not only the production related. In 2004 we are preparing for version 2.0 with the integration of openTRANS as a document interchange standard. The paper describes the working system and the structure of the standard; comparing it to other solutions and showing up some experiences of users. Finally we sketch the future of BMEcat.

1. Introduction

1.1 History and Background

Recently marketplace between sales and procurement has already developed into a digitalization and electronically level. This means that many companies in a different kind field of industry have developed and use their sale and procurement process to e-business, particularly big companies which have numerous number of suppliers and customers. This situation brings suppliers, manufacturers, distribution centre, sole agents, and customers from different kind of background into an e-marketplace. All of these market elements bring their products to the marketplace electronically that allow the participants of marketplace to see and study their products in more flexible way. The environment of e-marketplace is wide-range and variously. Same kind of products is offered by different suppliers with various ways and characters to the marketplace and manufacturer/customer are searching for the most optimum supplier from this marketplace. Imagine a big company like Siemens that has 220,000 suppliers to handle offer and find the right supplier for their purchasing. Therefore, a standard of product information is needed to ease customers to have the right information about the product and also for the supplier to provide the right information about their product.

1.2 The Solution

Today, about 160 electronically standards are circulating in the internet worldwide. Since November 1999 in Germany, the German Federal Association for Material Management, Purchasing and Logistics (Bundesverband Materialwirtschaft, Einkauf und Logistik eV. /BME) has issued a product catalogue standard, so called BMEcat which is an open source service. The version 1.0 was supported by leading companies like American Express, Alcatel, Bayer, BMW, Daimler Chrysler, SAP, Siemens, etc. The specialized development partners from BMEcat were carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute IAO, Stuttgart and the universities of Essen and Linz (Austria). The official technology partners are Oracle and JAB Germany.

BMEcat offers even more possibilities for the sales side. Apart from being used to transfer data, the standardised BMEcat catalogue document can also be put to excellent use in order to compile or update a purchaser′s own online shop for sales support. As the result, BMEcat will considerably reduce costs not only from the supplier side, but also from the purchasing side.

1.3 Development and Certification of BMEcat

Since the version 1.0 was released, it was upgraded two times to the version 1.2, and 2.0. The latest version 2.0 is planed to be released in second quarter 2004. The following figure and table gives an overview what was implemented since the first launch up to today.

Figure 1 development of BMEcat [Abbildung in der Downloaddatei vorhanden]

BMEcat, standard of product catalogue exchange
Version 1.01 (Release: November 1999)
– Extensive coverage of the requirements made of multi-media product data and catalogue structures
– Structuring of the product data in several fields, e.g. basic data, packaging data, price data, multimedia additional data, article structure data, catalogue structure data
– Recommendations for the use of standardized product classification systems (catalogue structures)
– Definition of must and can fields, data types, field lengths and additional regulations
– Definition of several catalogue transactions: for example new, complete product catalogue, updating of individual product data, updating of prices
– Possibility to transfer main data and multi-media additional data separately
– The Internet but also conventional media (CD-ROM, discs, DAT) can be used for data transfer
– Direct import into all important target systems for online catalogues used in procurement or sales
– Definition of data structures and exchange formats with the aid of XML, the standard descriptive language for structured data exchange in the Internet environment
– Simple expansion of the standard is possible to fulfil future requirements
– Users can add specific fields if required

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