Latest Technologies: EDI - Electronic Data Interchange

India Latest Technology - NANO

The much awaited Tata small car, which is giving sleepless nights to its rivals, was finally unveiled at the Auto Expo 2008. The small car, which is priced at Rs100, 000 (2,500 dollars), has been named Nano. According to the Tata Motors, the Nano will hit the Indian roads later this year. Ever since the Tatas announced their intention of developing the 1 lakh car (touted as people’s car), the auto industry experts have been raising doubts over the price, features, safety and specifications of Tata Nano. Have a look at specifications and other aspects of the Tata Nano, the four door mini-hatchback.

Looks & Dimensions of Nano: Keeping in mind the young age group, the Tata Motors has strived well to give the Nano a contemporary and stylish look. The snub-nosed small car derives inspiration from Fiat 500 and Nissan Micra. As far as dimensions of the car are concerned, Nano is 3.1 metres (10.23 feet) long, 1.5 metres wide and 1.6 metres high and can accommodate four to five people.

Engine: The small car sports a two cylinder 623 cc, 33 horsepower rear mounted multi-point fuel injection (MPFi) petrol engine. Tata claims that the car can touch the top speed of 105 kms.

Fuel Efficiency: Engineers at Tata Motors have designed an efficient engine that can run 20 Kms on every litre of petrol.

Pollution: Against the criticism and concerns of the environmentalists, Nano surpasses Indian regulatory requirements and Euro IV emission norms. In fact, Tata claims that the small car is less polluting than most of the bikes on Indian roads.

Safety: Tata says that they have tested the small car extensively for front, rear and side collisions and come out with a product that exceeds current regulatory requirements. The safety features of the Nano include a strong passenger compartment, intrusion resistant doors, seat belts, sturdy seats and anchorage.
Price: The base model of the car will sport a price tag of Rs 100,000 (2,500 dollars) which excludes taxes and transport costs. The high end/deluxe models will include air-conditioning and other features to be incorporated based on suggestions of the common people

Sunday, January 6, 2008

EDI - Electronic Data Interchange

EDI - Electronic Data Interchange - is defined in this context as the exchange of transaction messages from computer to computer, using structures based on a recognised national or international standard.
Early developments of EDI were driven primarily by large buying organisations - supermarkets, chain stores, health services - which had the financial muscle to influence their trading partners to adopt a standard method of electronic trading, initially largely to the benefit of the buyer, though ultimately with benefits for both sides. The typical application would be based on a “hub and spoke” model, the hub being the buying organisation, and the spokes its suppliers. Messages would be transported over dial-up or, for large users, leased line connection, to a value-added network (VAN), using proprietary protocols for assuring integrity, security and end-to-end audit trail. Each party would have a mailbox on the VAN.
The economics of this form of communication would certainly involve a volume charge for communication, so that the message standards aimed for conciseness, the fullest possible use of coded data, and minimal use of text.
Since the real payoff from EDI came not just from more efficient communication, but also from faster and more efficient processing and turnround of transactions at each end, it was important that a message could be processed automatically, and this was and is another powerful factor favouring coded data rather than text.
Early applications did nothing more than automate the existing way of doing simple transactions like orders, delivery notes and invoices, so that the benefits came from speed, accuracy, removal of duplicate keyboarding and elimination of paper and postage. More sophistication has crept in as companies have realised that continuous electronic communication between supplier and customer can bring additional benefits, eg by anticipating and planning for demand rather than waiting for orders, or even by allowing the supplier to take control of the maintenance of appropriate stock levels in stores (so-called “vendor-managed inventory”).
The consequence of the widespread adoption of EDI messaging standards - now increasingly focused on EDIFACT - is that there is an equally wide range of software and systems available to support their use. Most commercial users do not develop their own EDI front-ends. They buy in a package which typically handles mapping between the EDI standard and internal file formats defined by the user; the management of trading partner relationships, by maintaining a database of who’s who and what messages are enabled as part of the trading agreement; and the timetabling and automatic running of online sessions to send and receive messages.
Increasingly, the Internet is now being used for sending and receiving EDI messages, either by FTP or by email transfer. A simple MIME for encapsulating an EDIFACT message was defined as long ago as 1995 ; and, under the aegis of the Internet Engineering Task Force, a much more comprehensive standard is being finalised which is claimed to enable an EDI message to be sent over the Internet with the same levels of security and audit trail which the Value Added Networks have traditionally provided