RosettaNet

Background of RosettaNet

RosettaNet is an organisation set up by leading Information technology companies to define and implement a common set of standards for e-business/ e-commerce.

RosettaNet was form by Fadi Chade. An Egyptian boy who migrate to alone to the United State, studied in Stanford, and finally become responsible for e-commerce activities at the electronic distributor "Ingram Micro". The name of RosettaNet is taken from a stone found close to the Egyptian city of Rosetta in 1799. Back to 196 years before christianity, the message were written on the stone which are in Greek and two Egyptian languages. The Rosetta Stone become the help to scholar to decipher the Egyptian language. From then it serves primarily as a metaphor, as RosettaNet supports the translation of one company’s language into another’s.

The RosettaNet was not only perceived as a technical initiative, but rather as a huge management effort as the statement below:

“RosettaNet will adopt, promote, and facilitate the deployment of open content and open transaction rules for increasing IT supply chain and electronic commerce efficiency. Its mission is to provide common business interfaces for supply chain trading partners and their customers to exchange information and transactions.”

Architecture and Foundational Programs

The RosettaNet architecture consists of three main parts:

1. Partner Interface Processes (PIPs)
2. RosettaNet Implementation Framework(RNIF)
3. RosettaNet Dictionaries

RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes (PIPs) are specialized system-to-system XML-based dialogs that define business processes between trading partners. Each PIP specification includes a business document with the vocabulary, and a business process with the choreography of the message dialog. PIPs apply to the following core processes: Administration; Partner, Product and Service Review; Product Introduction; Order Management; Inventory Management; Marketing Information Management; Service and Support; and Manufacturing.

The RosettaNet Implementation Framework (RNIF) Core Specification provides exchange protocols for quick and efficient implementation of RosettaNet standards. The RNIF specifies information exchange between trading partner servers using XML, covering the transport, routing and packaging; security; signals; and trading partner agreement.

RosettaNet dictionaries provide a common vocabulary for conducting e-business, and reduce confusion in the procurement process due to each company's uniquely defined terminology. The RosettaNet Business Dictionary designates the properties for defining business transactions between trading partners. These Business Data Entities and Fundamental Business Data Entities in PIP Message Guidelines. The RosettaNet Technical Dictionary provides properties for defining products and services.

Benefits

The chief difference between EDI and RosettaNet is that EDI exchanges documents between companies, while RosettaNet defines business processes across the network and integrates them to determine the best course of action. Numerous case studies have shown that RosettaNet offers a variety of benefits over EDI. The most commonly cited benefits are:

1. an easier and more cost efficient implementation, with a greater return on investment (ROI)
2. the ability to automate a greater number of business processes
3. real-time transaction handling as opposed to batch processing
4. greater scalability

ebXML vs RosettaNet

Let's try to put RosettaNet in context by looking at the other XML-based B2B integration initiatives, namely ebXML. ebXML is often described as a horizontal B2B standard, meaning a set of specifications that is common to all e-business; it is general and not specific to any particular sector or industry. RosettaNet, on the other hand, is a vertical standard; it focuses on the needs of specific industries (for example, electronic components manufacturers) and the business area of supply chain automation and optimization. Since the creation of both initiatives there has been some duplication and convergence of the specifications in these standards. Perhaps the best way to conceptualize how these standards fit in with each other is to consider RosettaNet (vertical) plugging into to ebXML (horizontal). A good example of this is the use of the ebXML Business Process Specification Schema (BPSS) to describe RosettaNet Partner Interface Processes (PIPs)®. As we shall see later, PIPs define business process between partners.

Implementation with Web Service

Many organizations have identified the benefits of using Web services to implement their business processes. These include the open standards on which Web services are based, the service-orientated approach, and the degree of flexibility of implementation, which allows reuse of existing infrastructure and skills. All this sounds very familiar, and at this point you may be thinking, "If I can implement my business processes using Web services, what's the benefit of using RosettaNet?" The answer of this question is to look at business processes in more detail and gain an understanding of the difference between public and private processes.

A business process consists of a set of steps that, when executed, accomplish a certain business goal. The RosettaNet Implementation Framework (RNIF) defines private processes as business processes that are internal to the organization and public processes as involving interactions with trading partners. To start with, let's consider a simple business process: requesting a quote. The customer issues a request for a quote from a supplier by sending a message that contains the specifications of the quote. The supplier checks for the availability of the items in the inventory, and if it can meet the requirements of the quote, it sends the quote to the customer. If the supplier cannot meet the requirements of the quote, it may identify another supplier for the customer. In this case, a referral is sent to the customer.

In this example, checking the availability of items in the supplier's inventory and identifying alternative suppliers are internal processes that are not visible to the customer and do not involve trading partners. Such processes are therefore private. Typically, organizations have their own custom implementations for private processes that adhere to their own internal standards. They could utilize Java, CORBA, Web services, or any combination of legacy technologies. In the first step of our example the customer issues a request for a quote from the supplier; this is a public process. The problem of using Web services alone to implement this step is that without a clearly defined dialog between trading partners, we soon run into one of the key problems faced by EDI: we would have a different implementation of this service for every trading partner we want to deal with. By ensuring our Web service implementation of this public process adheres to RosettaNet standards, we can request a quote from any number of trading partners that do the same, without having to reinvent the wheel every time. RosettaNet and Web services are therefore complimentary, and Web services serve as an excellent implementation mechanism for the RNIF. It should be stressed, however, that we are not restricted to using Web services as an implementation for RosettaNet. Private business processes can be implemented with any suitable technology including Web services, but it makes sense to ensure that public processes adhere to RosettaNet specifications as this standardizes B2B communications between trading partners. In a typical implementation model we may expect to find custom Web services to be used to handle private business processes and RosettaNet-compliant services to handle public processes.