ABSTRACT
Business-to-business commerce is part of a set of measures to dematerialize the exchange of electronic data to improve the integration of different departments within the same enterprise or with commercial partners. This need for coordination became acutely apparent after the introduction of just-in-time production and with the emergence of global enterprises concerned about maintaining, if not enhancing, the speed of response as well as controlling operational cost, despite the breadth of area of geographic coverage. The dematerialization of business-to-business traffic started with tasks related to procurement. With the advancements in information technology (hardware and software) and in telecommunications, the focus expanded gradually to other technical or managerial areas to coordinate the separate elements of data or applications that were assembled as need arose to satisfy specific customer requests. Currently, the efforts aim at having a uniform architecture for the flow of information, end-to-end, along the supply chain.
