Automated Clearing House (ACH) — describes the associations created by banks to pass payments from one bank to another. ACH transfers may be either credit transfers (paying funds out) or debit transfers (pulling funds in) and they may be initiated by either the payee or the payer. Financial EDI (aka EFT-Electronic Funds Transfer) uses this system to send a set of standard instructions for one bank to send funds to another. In addition EFT provides for remittance information to flow with the banking instructions exchanged between parties.
Electronic Commerce — is a broad term describing electronic business transactions. It includes all electronic paperless methods of communicating business information such as electronic mail, internet store fronts, fax, imaging, forms, chat rooms, catalogs, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) also known as Financial EDI. Through the use of computer technology and standards, the movement of information can be remote, automatic and electronic.
In its broadest sense, the goal of electronic commerce is to mold the vast network of small businesses, government agencies, large corporations and independent contractors into a single community with the ability to communicate with one another across any computer platform. Internally to SCE, the goal is to receive data from external entities, share and integrate data within the company, and transfer information to external entities.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) — is the automated computer-to-computer exchange of structured business transactions between an enterprise and its vendors, customers, or other trading partners in a standard format, with a minimum of human intervention.
Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) — is a specialized sub-set of EDI that involves the movement of money from one bank account, through the Automated Clearing House, to another bank account. This technology has existed since 1972. Simply stated, EFT is the electronic transmission of bank to bank payment instructions, using a standard recognized by all major banks and business firms.
eXtensible Mark-Up Language (XML) — a web-language that has evolved from HTML (and its predecessors) and was developed for e-business exchange. XML is widely used to develop web-based applications and exchange data in the internet/intranet computing environment.
Trading Partner — SCE has a wide variety and number of potential trading partners including all of our customers, suppliers, banks, and governmental authorities. In each relationship, there are business transactions that are exchanged. For the purposes of electronic commerce, SCE is focused on converting paper purchase orders, invoices, shipping notices, and customer payments to electronic transactions.
Value Added Network (VAN) — service companies that receive and store data temporarily in private mailboxes to accommodate trading partners' schedules. The data is held in the "mailbox" for retrieval by the receiving company at its convenience. VANs provide communications options and other services such as compliance checking, timestamp, and data archive and retrieval.