The internet has made it possible for New Zealanders to transport their ideas and intellectual property around the world seamlessly. It’s not quite so easy to move physical products around the world, but internet-based technology has gone a long way towards making the world a smaller place for kiwi exporters.

For companies with a global network of offices, plants and agents such as Glidepath, solutions such as CRM, videoconferencing and VoIP are high on the shopping list to help manage that growth. “The primary reason for moving to CRM is to collectall the data from the other resources of the company, using CRM as the pivotal front end,” says group IT manager Raymond Pritchard.

Ordering from inventory online
For those without such a broad sales network making it easy for foreign customers to do business with can provide a competitive advantage. Online inventory and ordering capability is one such example. Many countries and customers around the world are far more advanced with e-commerce than New Zealand and are comfortable, and often expect, to be able to check inventory and orders online.

Conexa’s eNABLER product is one such solution that allows businesses of any size to provide a self-service solution for their customers. Buyers can order 24/7, view inventory, and access real-time pricing and availability. Sellers can use business rules to check orders; for instance, only certain people in an organisation may place orders.

While companies the size of BP and Castrol in Australia are using the New Zealand-developed system, it also makes it possible for small companies to manage the entire order-to-cash process online. “We’re covering the spectrum from very sophisticated big business right down to one-man bands who more and more are being asked to comply with increasingly complex procurement rules,” says Conexa’s Brent Ellison.

The same principle is at work in the timber industry, where timber merchant Access Pacific uses the power of the web to export. Access Pacific has only one New Zealand customer, the rest are dotted around the Pacific Rim. Access Pacific has developed a Virtual Warehouse, which allows customers to log in from any browser, view a real-time inventory of timber available, download shipping documents, and order timber. “Virtual Warehouse is solving a whole host of problems,” says Access Pacific general manager Noel Gudsell. “Instead of having a staff of five answering the phone and taking queries, our customers can enquire and order directly over the web.”

Right now 80% of Access Pacific’s clients use the website to access their shipping documents and check the progress of orders. “They can see what vessel it’s on, check the ETA on the vessel in their port, check what’s on the vessel - they can check everything,” says Gudsell.

Translation services
Another timber company that’s harnessing the power of technology is Red Stag Timber, which exports to Australia and Asia. It’s using a product called TimberExchange, which provides a cost-effective EDI link to a marketplace of different sawmills and their customers.

TimberExchange uses data mapping to translate the buyer’s terminology into the seller’s terminology. “We will provide a document to TimberExchange with our definitions of things, and it basically converts it into the language that the customer wants to receive and sends it to them,” says Red Stag Timber commercial manager Paul Laing (pictured).

“So we might call something MSG8 90x45; to the customer that might be radiata 100x50 MSG8. It’s a data converter, basically.”

Both Red Stag and Access Pacific - and every exporter - have to contend with two things that slow down exports: customs and banking. “The trouble today is that we can get an order and have it arrive at a port in the Pacific Islands before the banks can get the documentation to the customer,” says Gudsell.

Laing agrees. “Order management we can do online and efficiently, but a lot of documentation and customs will only accept originals of documents that have been stamped by banks as paid, letters of credit, and so on,” he says. “There’s a huge opportunity. We’ve talked with our banks about it and they’ve said it’s years away before the whole banking sector gets its head around the opportunities in the area and can make them work.” In just about every industry, specialised software is making it simpler for buyers and sellers to communicate and trade, without having to learn each others’ systems or terminology.

Another example is the ECN group’s supplier portal, which allows sellers to receive purchase orders electronically. The benefit for the buyer is that they don’t need to adopt a special order system specifically for that supplier; instead, ECN’s B2B translation engine converts the purchase orders, invoices and credit notes into a compatible format with the buyer’s back office ERP system. For smaller buyers without ERP infrastructure, the portal provides a simple, web-based system to place orders.

FX treasury management
When orders are placed, Red Stag Timber uses Tuatara’s hosted Currency Navigation System that integrates with Red Stag’s financials to manage foreign exchange volatility. These fluctuations can have a severe effect on export returns, sometimes wiping out exporters’ margins. The system not only helps ensure the best rate of return, it also enables the company to comply with new international accounting standards (IAS 39) by assessing hedge effectiveness, providing evidence of underlying exposures and documenting hedge strategies.

Customs online
And our Customs service doesn’t let the side down. New Zealand’s Customs documentation system is recognised as one of the world’s best, and that’s thanks to the ECNTrader gateway, managed by The ECN Group on behalf of NZ Customs.

The gateway handles every piece of import and export documentation - more than 80 million transactions every year - electronically. The software used ensures that customs declarations and documentation from every conceivable kind of organisation can be understood by the Customs system.

Prodoc is a company in the business of helping exporters produce high quality export documentation and electronic entries quickly and easily. The software allows exporters to save time - data is stored for re-use to prevent the need for re-keying - and money, with EDI messages costing only 80c per transaction, compared with $4.50 through the customs website. Prodoc brings together messaging for customs, MAF and shipping companies.

April 2007

By Simon Young

Supply chain visibility
Another significant trend in information technology for export is the importance of supply chain visibility. Both ECN’s supply chain solutions product set and Conexa’s eNABLER offer visibility and transparency across the entire transaction and documentation process, which can save time and costs, and enable better response to customer demand.

Another company that specialises in local and international supply chain visibility is the appropriately named Viisibility, which allows trading partners – or “communities” - to collaborate online by sharing any information they wish to make available from existing ERP or other systems. Every part of the supply chain - suppliers, contractors, partners, buyers - have access to the information they need. The data is gathered from any ERP system, and is presented in a single view to those with access rights. So in an export situation, everyone involved can be kept up-to-date on the progress of an order. “It’s all about letting people see for themselves what’s happening,” says Viisibility managing director Nick Shier. “They don’t have to log in to another party’s Oracle or SAP, and they don’t have to check the freight company’s website to track and trace. It’s all in one location.”

Viisibility has become something of an export success story itself, working with the US-based global giant Eaton. The New Zealand arm of the US$11 billion company is using Viisibility’s system with a view to rolling it out worldwide. Already Viisibility’s service is being used in Eaton’s operations in two countries, with plans to expand to all of Eaton’s subsidiaries.

“There are about nine companies all with totally different underlying systems and with Viisbility these guys get daily KPIs from them,” says Shier. “Because the information is extracted hourly, they’ll be able to get hourly KPIs from their companies worldwide.” (See Eaton case study.) The following diagram demonstrates how Viisibility can connect supply chains globally.

Viisibility recently signed a partnership agreement with Inttra - a company set up by a number of the major ocean carriers to make it easier for their exporters and freight forwarders - to allow Viisibility’s ‘communities’ to integrate directly with Inttra. Inttra provides a hosted system that facilitates bookings, shipping instructions, bills of lading, track and trace, reports, tender management and sailing schedules.

Shier offers a theory why great innovation in supply chain management is coming out of this country. “New Zealand is an interesting country in that we specialise in short runs, we specialise in export, we actually have a very complex supply chain. And as such, anything that we develop for the New Zealand supply chain tends to work anywhere else.”

Further Reading: Eaton Case Study

For more information, vendor solutions and case studies, visit the Supply Chain e-Commerce Research Pavilion