A couple of years ago, some executives at Emerson asked themselves a question: Why pay to send inventory from one supplier on one ship and goods from a second supplier on another ship, when both deliveries are coming from the same place and could be loaded into a single container?

It was an aha! moment that ended up saving millions for the St. Louis manufacturer that regularly ships supplies from Asia to North America and Europe. In late 2005, the company started a pilot program in which a logistics provider that specializes in transportation management for freight carriers worked with two Emerson divisions to consolidate multiple orders into the same shipping container. Not only did the pilot save money, the business units were able to tighten their global supply chains by better tracking shipments and managing inventory.

Naturally, Emerson wanted to expand the program. But here's where things got complicated: Emerson has 70 separate business units that purchase goods from 35,000 suppliers. Each unit communicates with its own suppliers via a combination of e-mail, spreadsheets, faxes, and phone calls. Asking a logistics provider to step into the middle of this tangled transaction web simply wasn't feasible.

"It's a brittle system," says Steve Hassell, VP and CIO at Emerson. "If a provider or a business unit makes changes, you have to go and touch tens or hundreds of connections."

Instead, Hassell's team envisioned a single hub that everyone would link to using common communications mechanisms and data formats. It would serve as a unified gateway that Emerson's business units, logistics providers, and suppliers could use to exchange information.

Of course, for a single communications hub to work, everyone has to speak the same language. Emerson decided to conduct transactions via two data formats: EDI, using the ANSI ASC X12 format, and OAGIS XML.

EDI data format standards are widely used. The OAGIS XML standard, though newer, is gaining traction as XML-driven Web services penetrate the enterprise. Using those formats, the Emerson Transaction Hub messaging platform was built on Sun Microsystems' SeeBeyond software, which facilitates business- to-business integration.