Exchanging data with your Aviation Fuel Business Partners is not as difficult as it seems
Business process digitalization and automation is a growing trend in the aviation fuel industry. An important element for process automation is the availability of structured data. While the IATA XML fuel data standards already provide a proven framework for structuring data in a standardized way, the implementation of data transmission infrastructures and the enablement of legacy IT systems to deal with IATA XML-structured data is considered a complex and costly endeavor which is a challenge for many organizations. But is doesn't have to be. The IATA XML fuel data standards in combination with the Atraxo Data Exchange SaaS product represent a great solution to enable existing IT systems and to participate in IATA XML-based data exchanges with business partners.
Introduction to IATA XML Data Standards
Thanks to the IATA XML fuel data standards developed over the past years by the IATA Fuel Data Standard Group (FDSG) of which Atraxo is a member, the aviation fuel industry has already access to an established framework that is used industry-wide to exchange commercial and operational data between business partners. As of today, the IATA XML fuel data standards include i) Fuel Tender/Bid XML schema, ii) Fuel Operational XML schema, iii) Fuel transaction XML schema, and iv) Fuel Invoice XML schema. More information about the IATA XML fuel data standards can be found on IATA's website at https://www.iata.org/en/programs/ops-infra/fuel/data-standards.
XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language and provides a description of data elements that can be included in a certain XML message. In this sense, the IATA XML fuel data schemas define the "language" to be used to build XML messages which are exchanged between business partners. Examples for XML messages are fuel invoices, fuel tender invitation, fuel bids, or fuel tickets. Due to its structured data representation, XML is ideally suited for processing by IT systems and therefore is an essential component for the digitalization and automation of business processes.
Using the IATA XML fuel data standards, business partners can now easily exchange fuel-related business documents in a standardized way that allows immediate processing by IT-supported processes. This is a huge achievement compared to previous processes when paper documents were faxed, PDF documents emailed, or Excel sheets shared.
Current Challenges
However, before enjoying the benefits of automated data exchange, two topics need to be addressed.
First, to connect the IT systems of business partners, both sides need to agree on the technical method of data transmission. In praxis, three methods are in use today which are i) sFTP (secure File Transfer Protocol), ii) eMail attachments, and iii) web services. The decision which of these transmission methods to use often depends on the capability of the IT systems installed. It is not uncommon to see that for example a fuel supplier needs to maintain individual data connections to each of its customers, utilizing different transmission methods. Such IT setup can become quite complex and therefore costly to maintain when doing business with a large number of business partners.
The second and more severe topic is the capability (or lack of capability) of IT systems to generate and process XML messages built according to the IATA XML fuel data standards. While existing IT systems have the capability to generate say fuel invoices, they lack the capability to send the fuel invoice in the IATA XML fuel invoice format to their customers. Such inability to produce IATA XML formatted business documents can seriously impede the growth of an organization since almost every company today is looking to digitize and automate its business processes which required the availability of structured data such as XML-formatted massages. Enabling existing IT systems to process XML data according to the IATA fuel data standards is in almost all cases a costly activity and might also depend on the willingness of the IT system provider to play along.
How Atraxo Data Exchange can help
Luckily, there is a solution to overcome the above mentioned challenges. The Atraxo Data Exchange provides a centralized IT platform that enables the secure exchange of structured data between business partners. These structured data are organized in form of messages which consist of a message header and a message body. The message header is comparable to the outside of an envelope that contains information such as sender, receiver and type of content sent. The message body contains the message itself in form of an XML or similar structure. To ensure confidentiality, the business partners exchanging data can encrypt the message body using any public/private key encryption method.
Functioning as a post office, the Atraxo Data Exchange receives data messages from business partners connected to the data exchange. These messages are processed by a message bus system that guarantees delivery to the receiver or list of receivers as defined in the message header. Since the data exchange takes care of the data delivery, each business partner just needs to configure a single data connection per content type to exchange data with any partner connected to the data exchange. Obviously, this is a huge improvement to the previous situation where individual connections to each business partner had to be configured and maintained.
Another important feature of the Atraxo Data Exchange is the concept of data converters. Data converters are small software programs that process the message body of data messages. Typically, data converters are used to change the format of data contained in the message body. Therefore, data converters are very powerful tools to enable existing IT systems to participate in IATA XML-based data exchanges. Assuming the existing IT system can export/import the required data in any format, the IATA XML enablement is quite straightforward. Firstly, establish a data connection between the IT system and the Data Exchange, using any of the supported transmission methods. Atraxo will then implement a data converter that converts the custom data format provided by the IT system into an equivalent IATA XML message representation. The converted XML message is processed by the Data Exchange transport system and delivered to the intended receiver. The same data conversion process also works the other way around when the IT systems expects to receive data in a custom format. Thus, the data converter concept provides a cost efficient option to enable existing IT system to participate in IATA XML-based data exchanges.
To learn more about the Atraxo Data Exchange and the benefits it provides, please visit https://www.atraxo.com/aviation-hub.
