White Paper: B2B - Size Doesn't Matter!
Connecting your business into a trading community or linking with partners to streamline transactions and build tighter supply chain relationships is the cornerstone for efficient e-commerce. But if you are using incompatible databases and document formats you may find yourself locked out of the conversation. In this Industry Report, iStart looks at five organisations offering translation software or services to get you speaking the same language, no matter what size your company.
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The market is awash with talk about e-procurement, e-commerce and integrating the supply chain but all the fancy technology in the world isn't going to be much use unless company 'A' speaks the same document language as company 'B' For over a decade business has been cobbling together code to enable incompatible database and business systems to share files and forms and to allow legacy mainframe or minicomputers to talk sense to new generation PC networks. Many businesses still re-key documents from one system into the next or rely on faxes and paper-based invoice and order systems within their trading community at significant cost. Gartner Group estimates that within a typical enterprise computing environment 35-40 per cent of all programming is devoted to writing scripts solely for the transfer of data between different databases. Now the Internet has grown up and IP is the pathway to open systems, some very smart message broking systems are making it easier for the business-to-business (B2B) revolution to become a reality. By translating previously incompatible file formats companies with different technology and processes can send and receive orders, invoices, receipts and other essential business documentation without losing the plot. And its not only large corporations with a constant flow of orders to process and megabucks to spend that can benefit. esolutions - the joint venture between Telecom, Microsoft and EDS -for example, is about to launch a solution that scales right across the market.
Steve Hornblow, Strategic Projects Manager of InfoXchange at esolutions says InfoXchange can be geared for a one person business running MYOB, or typing up invoices on an Excel spreadsheet, to a major enterprise with dozens of trading partners sending 10,000 faxes a week and running a large SAP or JDE system. The affordable document translation service validates the content of specified fields against business rules. It can translate EDI and most common data types with XML (eXtensible Markup Language) as the central schema, although some development work may be required for less common formats. The latest addition to InfoXchange is Xchanger, developed in conjunction with a local firm, which sits on a Windows-based PC at the clients offices and polls a specified internal directory looking for purchase orders, invoices or shipping notices. It automatically dials up the Internet using Triple Des encryption, and sends files for translation to InfoXchange. Before set up and value added options the basic cost is $20 a month and it typically takes half an hour to set up. The new service doesn't officially hit the market until the end of the year but there are currently six customers piloting it and another 10 who've placed orders. It's essentially a variant on the hub and spoke model with esolutions initially focussed on big organisations who carry a lot of weight with their suppliers. "They're typically incurring a lot of cost, dealing with partners by fax or other means, which can be reduced significantly as InfoXchange glues them and their partners into a trading community." "Once one party is connected they can link with any other trading partner that's already on the system rather than being locked into point-to-point connections."
Strategy Before Coding Most organisations outsource the installation of such packages to a systems integrator to handle development and map documents in and out of databases, enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM). Businesses with a small IT budget but sophisticated products they want to share may benefit from having BizTalk Server installed to manage internal applications and suppliers. For those doing a lot of paper handling or re-keying there is instant payback and they can be up and running sometimes within three months. Microsoft, technical marketing manager Terry Allen says many organisations in evaluating BizTalk discover their business processes aren't as seamless as they would like. "It makes you look at how you run your business. You can't just jump in and start coding you need to understand what you've got and how to map your processes as part of an overall business strategy." The entry level cost can be anywhere from $9000 for those with a limited number of partners through to the full enterprise package at around $61,000 per processor which allows for unlimited applications plus some higher level features.
"Most New Zealand businesses can't afford to spend $100,000 putting in an EDI infrastructure to get company A talking to company B. We provide a service in the middle that can handle all the differences." Flat White or EDI? ECN initially developed its in-house technology on an IBM Unix-based platform, with a translator and database at the core, to try and make sense of the move to EDI (electronic document interchange) in the 90s. EDI was a very complex and bureaucratic approach and while many firms are still using it, the Internet as a transport mechanism has significantly changed the cost. However you still need to have an agreed file structure, file format and syntax whether it's flat file, comma delimited EDI or XML.
A message structure map is automatically created so ECN knows where the file is meant to go, and in what format, based on the business rules the customer has supplied. ECN's largest customer is NZ Customs - it acts as the gateway handling all electronic import and export entries. It also handles translation of documents on behalf of TranzRail, Repco, Carters, MasterTrade, Foodstuffs and several shipping companies. "Some have big iron in their data centre and others modern implementations of PeopleSoft, SAP, Baan or BPCS and need to connect electronically to trading partners," says Mr Carmody. ECN also provides application-to-application connections enabling computer systems to talk to each other internally across a complexity of different systems in different departments. The cost depends on the level of customising. If the back-end system can handle comma delimited files these can be attached to email at no charge except a monthly fee, based on the number of transactions and support requirements. It could be as low as $50-$100 a month for a low volume business. If there are lots of partners with high transactions it could range to thousands of dollars a month. The in-house server-based product tidies up data flow automatically. For 16 connections you'll pay as little as $10,000. The price varies up to $100,000 for a full solution.
Another product which recently came to market is the locally developed SLIK Software - an 'interoperability engine' initially designed to integrate legacy systems at Fisher & Paykel into the PeopleSoft OneWorld system. The company wanted to keep using their old systems to enter and access data. As the requirements grew so did the package, which manages database transfers by providing table and column mapping. It was specifically built to talk to PeopleSoft enterprise software but has been extended to hook into any ODBC (open database compliant) database. SLIK Software is a partnership between Mike Nelson and developer Chris Wenzlick who's been working with enterprise software since he began with Fisher & Paykel in 1981. The suite of software has a business process management system which logs all data transfers which can be viewed from a web browser allowing further processing of data if needed. SLIK can detect errors as they occur, sending pager or email messages to alert operators, and can roll back prior to the error to prevent the use of erroneous data.
While the package is not cheap at $200-$300,000, depending on how many document types and trading partners you have, it is a complete approach that sits over an organisation's entire B2B needs. Mr Holley says there's a lot more involved than simply mapping one document to another. While XML is often held up to be a panacea it's simply another document type and doesn't work with some legacy systems. "Getting documents flowing between organisations is quite simple but people often don't realise until they get B2B information translated that there's a lot more to do to get it into finance and warehousing systems and check for data integrity." More Than Just Software While translation is just the tip of the iceberg it's a good place to start. Audit trails, logging and managing the infrastructure are also important cogs in the system. "Viewlocity provides any-to-any translation capability regardless of platform, database, communications network or application. It makes you a lot easier to do business with - you don't have to dictate standards to people," says Mr Holley.
Having internal systems that talk to each other and provide accurate real-time information on the state of your business is essential otherwise major problems will rapidly become evident when you try to link to business partners. Achieving the grand vision of a seamless flow of information within organisations and between suppliers, distributors and customers still requires some serious planning to ensure all things work together for the common good. Accurately translating documents so you and your partners are speaking the same language is pivotal. If what you send is not what is received chances are you won't get what you thought you asked for. |
By Keith Newman
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