The principal aim of the project was to set up, in a relevant industrial T/C district (Biella, the European leading industrial district for the upper class worsted wool), a trial of inter-companies business communication, via WEB, relying on a set of middleware tools based on both the new XML family languages and the past experience of EDI in the European Textile Clothing industry (Electronic Document Exchange).

The long term objective was to contribute to the adoption, at European level of a more responsive approach along the T/C supply chain, with a specific attention to the SMEs, using technologies and methodologies already existing but not still well adapted to the T/C users' needs.

The project consisted of two main objectives in a business-to-business perspective:

• to test an architecture of middleware tools (adaptation and integration of commercially available middleware based on Java) to obtain solutions to simplify the management of a set of documents that can be applied to different scenarios and business processes with a common core that is:


• WEB based,
• economic,
• simple,
• strong,
• flexible,
• scalable.
• legacy systems integrable


• to adapt to the standard XML technologies and to test, on field, a commonly accepted set of documents (called MODA-ML, derived from the EDIFACT/EDITEX experience) for the business-to-business activities in the T/C sector, with a specific focus of the interaction fabric supplier-garment supplier of the supply chain.

T/C companies with a very different level of technological know–how are able to deploy these tools and documents with a minimal effort and through the already available skills.