Turbulent markets need flexible supply chain communication

This paper consists of three main sections. The first section discusses mar ket turbulence and the transition from mass production to mass customizatio n as driving forces for organizational change and optimization, which leads to IT-support and virtual enterprises. The second section describes the ke y-elements of supply chain management as one building block for virtual ent erprises. Low-cost and flexible Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the ke y-enabler to automate the interactions between companies and their partners . In the third section, a complete concept and a prototype realization for Internet EDI using XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is proposed. This appro ach is based on Internet and XML, because the implementation of traditional EDI (e.g. EDI-FACT, ANSI X. 12) is mostly too costly for small and medium sized enterprises, which has to be integrated as suppliers and customers in a supply chain. XML will be the international standard for Internet commun ication in the near future.