In growing popularity in industry and commerce is the ability to transmit and receive documents in an electronic format over the Internet.

 

Introduction
In growing popularity in industry and commerce is the ability to transmit and receive documents in an electronic format over the Internet.

Although today the preferred electronic business transfer method is EDI, however more and more we see the continued growth of information interchanged using XML.

The primary resistance to the full realisation of the potential of this interchange method is the fact that as of today, there are still no recognised formatting standards for the use of this interchange method and it is still left between the trading or communicating parties to decide how the structure will be defined.

This means that many companies and organisations are left with a number of issues;

• How can they convert a specific document such as a purchase order or invoice into an agreed or structured format that can be used by another organisation?

• How can they manage the problem of having to produce differing structure formats of the same document for use by different organisations?

• How can they send just some of the documents in the print run in this format such as purchase orders, when normally they are faxed, e-mailed or printed?

• How can they easily adapt their existing systems to send documents in this format or handle documents of this type if they are received?

Conditional Processing
SabreFDI has now been adapted using its conditional processing ability that specific documents in a print run can be converted into an “Interchange” format to suit the needs of a specific organisations interchange formatting methods.

SabreFDI can then be told to extract and send a document in an agreed format directly from the print run, in much the same selection method as if it was send a fax or e-mail, which of course can still continue in the same print run concurrently.

Additional development of the SabreFDI data processing server and archiving system means that documents received in this format can be “Processed” by SabreFDI and placed in a readable format in the SabreArc archiving system.

Other facilities can be written by in house staff or specialist third parties that can “Post” extracts of the information into financial and other host systems.

Although this type of facility may be currently be of greater benefit to Industry than the NHS, these exciting developments allow a degree of “Future proofing” and flexibility that might extend the life of some NHS core IT financial systems or reduce the cost of new systems when this facility is required.