To address this issue the standards will allow for a limited number of alternative codes to facilitate the transition process. The complexity surrounding pricing, taxation and international customs and excise has resulted in the inclusion of simple price levels within transactions and a realisation that within the three month period of our work we can not resolve this issue. The Board will however allocate further work on this area to the appropriate future working group. Simple e-business requires trading partners to synchronise their master data before transactions begin to flow. Master data refers to commercial information that business partners agree will remain unchanged for a period of time and does not need to be re-transmitted with each transaction.
Information regarding items, pricing and delivery locations are examples of master data.
To successfully implement simple e-business, organisations will rationalise business processes and adopt strategies to harmonise information about products, locations and trading partners. Taken to an industry level, the adoption of simple e-business drives the argument for a singular recommended standard for product and party identification across all value chains. The key requirement now is to transform the conceptual results of the workgroups into reality. This means that a live proof of concept needs to be organised. Two proofs will actually be needed, the first to show that the simple e-business processes and associated data models are indeed adequate to conduct the basic business transactions within an exchange and a second, to show that they are adequate for two businesses who are not in an exchange.