PPAI Announces Formation of e-PromoStandards Alliance

PPAI Announces Formation of e-PromoStandards Alliance

By G. Stephen Slagle, CAE, President, PPAI

Promotional Products Association International recently embarked on one of the most significant endeavors in the history of the promotional products industry--the formation of the PPAI e-PromoStandards Alliance^SM (e-PSA). The e-PSA will be a consortium of industry leaders, prominent service providers, and expert technology advisors that will focus on maintenance and administration of promotional products data standards for e-Business activities and transactions.

PPAI is taking an active role in this initiative in immediate response to the recommendation of PPAI's Technology Summit, which took place in April 2000, and included 30 industry leaders from key distributor and supplier companies.

Summit participants recommended unanimously that PPAI should urgently begin organizing the standards development process as open, non-proprietary, and democratic.

The PPAI Board of Directors approved the recommendation of summit members in early May and authorized the creation and maintenance of the PPAI e-PromoStandards Alliance and other initiatives to address the industry's increasing need for solutions to automate and standardize business processes.

PPAI is committed to ensuring the e-PSA will provide the industry with an open, common standard for doing e-Business that will be accessible to all. The standards will be provided free to every interested company.

What is the e-PSA?

The formation of the e-PromoStandards Alliance will result in common, flexible, and easy to use e-Business standards for the entire industry. Failure to establish these standards will have serious consequences for our industry.

"Our industry is already plagued with a variety of sporadic attempts from proprietary companies to establish standards," said David Woods, PPAI Chairman of the Board. "The e-PSA is crucial to our industry because it will enable the development of e-standards in an objective, non-proprietary way for the benefit of the entire industry."

The standards will be created through a democratic process by the industry and will ensure that all companies in the industry can speak a common language in handling data exchange requirements.

The e-PSA will oversee the creation and release of the initial standards, and the Alliance will then continue to revise, update, and maintain the standards based on industry feedback.

Why standards are needed

Like many other industries, technology advances have made e-Commerce a viable way of conducting business in the promotional products industry. A distributor can have a website with the option for buyers to order promotional products online. The buyer can place an order over the Internet, and the distributor can fulfill the order in the usual way with the appropriate supplier. This is one aspect of e-Commerce in our industry.

An even more technologically advanced process of e-Business in this industry occurs when a distributor's website is also connected directly to the supplier that makes the product that the buyer ordered. When the buyer places the order, the order form automatically highlights the fields that have to be completed for that particular product, including sizes, shapes, materials, colors, imprint, quantities, prices, etc.

The buyer's order goes directly (and transparently) to the supplier with a copy to the distributor. The order can be placed, accepted, and acknowledged without a phone call or a single piece of paper.

To take this process even further, the artwork can be transmitted electronically to the supplier, a production sample posted to the distributor's website in a special folder for the buyer, electronic approval from the buyer, production of the product, shipment, and shipping confirmation all can happen electronically.

Also, the invoice for the order can be generated electronically, the buyer approves the payment electronically, the bank makes the payment electronically, and the distributor and supplier are paid electronically. At this point, an entire order has been taken, produced, shipped, payment made, and practically no phone calls, no paperwork generated, and no time wasted. Now imagine a comprehensive distributor website that is connected electronically to every major supplier in the industry.

Many companies are already well along the road to developing the tools that will enable you to do all of this or just parts of it. That is the great news for our industry. The bad news is that there is only one thing missing--standards.

In order for this whole system to work, we need common standards and there are two basic types of standards: there are standards that are open, common, and accessible to all players in an industry--the kind that will be developed by the e-PSA; and then there are standards that are private, owned by one company, and do not interact with any other company's standards.

Hundreds of companies right now are working on developing their own proprietary e-Business systems and standards for this industry. Imagine the headaches for suppliers and distributors if each had their own proprietary system and standards that must be connected to in order to do business with one another.

If we choose private, proprietary standards as an industry, we will make doing business together incredibly complex, expensive and difficult. We will have made it more difficult for our buyers to do business with us as well, and we will have really shot ourselves in the foot.

If we don't establish a common standard for everyone to use, here is what we will end up with:

• Major distributors and suppliers each with their own proprietary standards that require customers to develop systems to accept their standards
• Information Service Providers that create their own proprietary standards

Our industry would have e-Business gridlock. Every proprietary system would require its own separate software to link to the financial services industry for financial transactions, the transportation industry for shipping transactions and tracking, and any other relevant industries for the conduct of e-Business. Ultimately we would not be able to service our most critical customers effectively, the buyers.

Other major successful e-Business companies would quickly take advantage of our self-inflicted gridlock and service our customers.

The Scope of the Initiatives

The PPAI e-PromoStandards Alliance will create, maintain, and administer industry standards for the conduct of e-Business. The scope will include such things as an industry dictionary, data standards, process standards, technology standards, and an industry data warehouse. This initiative will enable all industry companies to communicate and conduct e-Business with a common XML standard. Development of this standard is critical.

The standards will be distributed freely for the industry to use via the epromostandards.org website, which will become a dynamic interactive web portal that will deliver the standards faster, more efficiently, and with less overhead. The Alliance will also work to ensure that our industry can communicate effectively with other relevant industries such as the banking industry in order to facilitate electronic financial transactions, and the shipping industry to ensure electronic order processing, tracking, billing, and payments.

The Next Steps

The PPAI e-PromoStandards Alliance works through a two-tiered structure, the governance team and various work groups. The governance team will be organized from a cross-section of industry members. This team will oversee the operations of the work groups that will be formed to develop standards in the necessary areas.

Once the Alliance is established, the first order of business will be the development of an industry e-standard glossary, or dictionary of product and data descriptions from which various standards for transactions will emerge. A website for PPAI's e-PromoStandards Alliance provides an interactive and dynamic web portal to deliver services, e-standards, data dictionary, and technology information to the industry.

What You Can Do

Supporting the e-PromoStandards Alliance may be one of the most important things you can do for your future. If we develop open, common standards for everyone, every company can develop its own unique products and services for its respective customers and we can all speak a common language. This is a win-win for everyone, particularly our ultimate customers, the buyers.

Hundreds of industry leaders have already pledged their support for this effort. Even if you don't anticipate doing e-Business tomorrow, this initiative will benefit all of us enormously in the long run.

The PPAI e-PromoStandards Alliance needs volunteers. If you are interested in participating, please send some background information and your area of interest to Jan Streitwieser, PPAI Director of IT, at jans@ppa.org.You can also visit the PPAI e-PromoStandards Alliance Web site at www.epromostandards.org for more information.

Promotional Products Association International is the only international, nonprofit trade association for the promotional products industry. PPAI represents more than 6,500 promotional product distributor and supplier companies. For more information on joining PPAI or attending PPAI's trade shows, call 1-888-492-6891, or visit the Association's Web site at www.ppa.org.

Glossary

ASPs
(Application Service Providers)

ASPs are used when an organization finds it more cost effective to have someone else host their Internet applications than to do it themselves. The ASP provides the servers, network access, and applications to be used usually for a monthly or yearly subscription fee.

back end

A generalized term that has come to mean a variety of programs and processors that receive data submitted by front-end applications or processors and return the results. For example, a database might have a front end where users write queries. The front end takes the search terms and hands them off to a back-end program that actually runs the search and gives back the results. The front-end machine might then display the results in a more user-friendly format.

bitmap

Lots of tiny, little dots put together to make a picture. Screens (and paper) are divided into thousands of tiny bits, each of which can be turned on or off.

These bits are combined to create graphical representations. GIF files are the most popular kind of bitmap files on the Net.

.com

When this appears as the last part of an address (in internet@dummies.com, for example), it indicates that the host computer is run by a computer rather than by a university (.edu) or governmental agency (.gov). It also means that the host computer is probably in the United States.

domain

The official Internet-ese name of a computer on the Net. It's the part of an

Internet address that comes after the @.

front end

A graphical user interface (GUI) that makes another program easier to use. The front end replaces the original program's commands with simpler commands, menus or icons.

GIF

A type of graphics file originally defined by CompuServe and now found all over the Net (GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format).

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language, used in writing pages for the Worldwide Web. It lets the text include codes that define fonts, layout, embedded graphics and hypertext links.

ISP (Internet Service Provider)

An organization that allows users to pay a fee to dial into its computers and connect to the Internet. ISPs usually provide the user with an e-mail address, as well as a Web browser.

pipelining

An advanced microprocessing technique in which the server handles several stages of different instructions at one time.

SLA (Service Level Agreement)

A contract that lays out specific quality and performance levels you can expect from an ASP. It details the nuts and bolts of day-to-day service.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator, a way of naming Network resources, originally used for linking pages together in the Worldwide Web.

XML (Extensible Markup Language)

Similar to HTML, what XML adds is the ability to define custom tags and define the meaning of those tags within the XML document itself. XML will become more common as more browsers and Web servers support the XML standard.

1. Knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction.
2. Knowledge of a specific event or situation; intelligence. See Synonyms at knowledge.
3. A collection of facts or data: statistical information.
4. The act of informing or the condition of being informed; com munication of knowledge: Safety instructions are provided for the information of our passengers.
5. Computer Science. A nonaccidental signal or character used as an input to a computer or communications system.
6. A numerical measure of the uncertainty of an experimental outcome.
7. Law. A formal accusation of a crime made by a public officer rather than by grand jury indictment.