Upon electronically approving his request, his supervisor sets a complex series of events in motion. First, relevant data from the request form is forwarded to accounting and stored in a database which is used to track travel expenses. Next, the data is forwarded to accounts payable so that the airline ticket can be obtained. The ticket is electronically ordered on the company account and Mr. X is e-mailed that his trip has been approved. Mr. X beats his competition to the punch and makes the sale.
Replication is simply the maintenance of current data across the enterprise server pool.
This may be accomplished by a variety of schemes but by far the most robust is that implemented in Lotus Notes. Replication occurs at field level in Notes documents. Exchange, however, requires replication at the folder level using much more network bandwidth. Data conflicts are another consideration. Let's say two separate users are working on the same customer profile document concurrently.