6. Conclusions

Although traditional EDI has some success in specific industries and certain big enterprises, it has not been widely adopted by many companies (especially the small and medium-sized). The substantial barrier blocking companies from implementing EDI is the costs, due to EDI implementation and VAN services. The Internet is a ubiquitous public network that provides many advantages over VANs, including low cost, worldwide connectivity, platform-independent, and ease of use infrastructure.

For small- and medium-sized companies, our proposed Internet EDI model offers an alternative solution that is less expensive yet offers many of VANs' advantage. It contains the following features:

• it enables suppliers to conduct automated EDI transactions with the large enterprise, using only a PC and a Java-capable Web browser, without installing any EDI software or setting protocols;
• it allows large enterprise (hub) to utilize its existing EDI system to conduct automated EDI transactions with the suppliers (spokes) that are not EDI-enabled;
• it can coexist with the traditional VAN-EDI that large enterprises are already using;
• it offers mailboxing, E-mail notification, audit and control, documents tracking, archive, query status, report, and other value-added services;
• it provides security services such as login security, access control, and SSL transport;
• it provides end-to-end backend integration that automates the business flow between the hub and the spokes; and it supports Internet EDI as well as XML/EDI.

Purchasing via the Web is becoming popular. Competitive business pressures will force the companies to facilitate interactive buying and selling [7]. Interactive EDI intends to provide rapid interactive transactions in the front, meanwhile, utilize EDI technology to automate the transactions with the backend system to support rapid response. The proposed model has better chance to provide Interactive EDI as it uses EDI between the Web server and the backend system in the hub site and provides HTML web page to the client side (spoke).