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The idea of applications interacting with one another within the enterprise through a common set of protocols is often referred to as "Enterprise Application Integration" (EAI). The scope of EAI goes well beyond supply chain management, encompassing many other organizational areas in which enterprise-wide, real-time data is useful, including applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and financial reporting and analysis. Applied across the chain to supply chain partners, this idea is often called B2B Integration. The practical impact of these emerging standards (or protocols, as they are usually called) is that once widely adopted, B2B Integration (the acquisition of data from one partner's Application A for use by their supply chain partner's Application B) would be much closer to plug-and-play than it is today. This would sharply reduce the IT cost of accomplishing such information-sharing or information-linking, and thus make information sharing across applications and indeed across company boundaries much more feasible.

If you wish to use a particular application, you would use UDDI to find it, literally using a SOAP message; once you find it, you would access the application's WSDL file (again, a document using XML and in SOAP format). The only manual coding required to link these items would be the initial generation of a SOAP request and the above-mentioned SOAP "wrapper" for your application. New applications may have SOAP built into their functionality in the future. The animation below illustrates how this might work: