scope:

This CWA aims to give small and medium sized enterprises a fast to establish and easy to use alternative to traditional EDI approaches. The hope is that a wider adoption of EDI in Europe will streamline administrative processes in many companies and thus will foster competitiveness of our continent.

This workshop agreement is intended as a guideline for the exchange of business documents between companies within a non-hierarchical business network by electronic communication. Since each company has a multitude of business relationships in its network, it is important to keep communication to many partners easy to handle. Especially for small and medium sized enterprises, a multilateral approach will simplify electronic business communication as today the efforts to handle bilateral communication channels are too heavy.

The concept is to route the communication through a central platform in the Internet using a standardised data format which is described in this workshop agreement. This way a single data format can be utilised within a complete network of companies. The data format shall be lightweight enabling companies of all sizes to communicate. Additionally it shall be free of redundancies for purpose of clear semantics and unambiguous implementation. Both aspects are hardly possible with traditional data formats like EDIFACT. This is the reason why electronic communication still is not spread widely in Europe, especially amongst SME.

As any company uses different IT systems, it is necessary to connect each company to the mentioned platform individually using an individual data format and individual transmission channel between the platform and the company. The platform takes care of the transmission and the conversion between the individual data format and the standardised data format, which is described in this workshop agreement, using defined mapping procedures. This way mapping is reduced from various bilateral mappings to mapping to the standard format.

Besides technical issues, legal issues also need to be solved when exchanging business documents for all the member states of the European Union. The basics for solving these legal issues will also be addressed within this agreement.