eBusiness

The AIA vision for eBusiness across the industry is that:

All participants in the aerospace value chain will be able to exchange information relative to product design, business relationships, transactions, and product support across an information backbone which is open and accessible to all.

This vision is being achieved through industry agreements on policy, infrastructure and standards, eliminating the need to force the adoption of common IT tools across the industry.

This site provides a single source of reference for the recommended AIA solutions to key eBusiness interoperability issues arising across organisations and their customers and supply networks.

The recommendations are maintained by the Electronic Enterprise Integration Committee (EEIC), which is chartered jointly by the eBusiness Steering Group and the Supplier Management Council to identify and assess key standards and initiatives to support industry eBusiness requirements, and to develop agreed industry recommendations and guidelines for their use. The principal challenge addressed by the EEIC is the need to identify a coherent set of standards-based solution components which can be used to address a broad range of eBusiness scenarios, eliminating the costs of developing individual point-to-point solutions. Adoption of such standards-based solutions can deliver business benefits to prime contractors and suppliers, by offering common interfaces to multiple customers and facilitating deployment of simplified electronic processes.

The EEIC has developed a consistent methodology and framework for managing the business scenarios and solution components, with processes for developing recommended solutions and adopting new solution components. The methodology and framework are described in detail in the AIA eBusiness Implementation Guidebook.

The defined business scenarios and recommended solution components can be found by following the links below.

Solution Components

The EEIC Radar Chart (Powerpoint required to view) provides a simple reference for the various technology standards and initiatives that are under the attention of the EEIC.

The radar chart illustrates the maturity of the recommendation for each standard or initiative, with the outer ring populated by work that is being actively tracked by the EEIC, the inner ring showing work that is a candidate for adoption as part of the eBusiness Framework, and the central circle showing components that have been adopted as AIA recommendations.

The four quadrants of the chart show the AIA strategy for each component. In decreasing order of preference, the strategies include:

Adopt existing standard
Monitor external development - where the development is intended to deliver a necessary component
Participate in external development - where the work needs to be steered to meet AIA needs
AIA development - where no appropriate external tasks can be leveraged to meet our needs

The following standards and initiatives have been adopted, or are under consideration: