MarketSite Africa has developed an offline trading solution for its suppliers to MarketSite Africa, which is already being used by other e-marketplaces such as Bidvest's mymarket.com.
The solution, SupplyOrder Auto Manager (SAM), allows suppliers to download their orders, process them offline and then go back online to send out their responses to buyers. SAM has already been implemented at 400 of MarketSite Africa's and mymarket.com suppliers and allows them to process their orders in a fraction of the time this took previously.
Suppliers that use the Internet to trade typically do not have access to leased or digital lines, and as supplying companies range in size from micro to medium to large companies, the limited bandwidth available in SA has meant that suppliers spend an unnecessary amount of time online downloading their orders from the Internet.
In the South African environment this has meant that suppliers incurred large phone bills as they needed to stay online for long periods of time to download and process their orders The offline solution, SAM, has been developed to take away the difficulties of trading online and, once stored locally on the supplier's PC, the supplier can disconnect from the portal, make amendments to each order, make updates to the various fields pertaining to the orders and then reconnect.
The solution works with most versions of Internet Explorer and Windows. The technology that the solution was based on uses the Microsoft .Net framework.
Removing online trade barriers
"Early on we identified bandwidth constraints as one of the barriers to Internet trading for suppliers trading with our MarketSite Africa buyers," says Christine Thomson, director of MarketSite Africa's vendor management and supplier adoption.
Locally developed SAM offers suppliers the ability to manage the bulk of their orders offline. "We found that suppliers were concerned about the length of time they spent online as most of the suppliers use dial-up connections to access the e-marketplace, and usually connect through second- and third-tier ISPs, which can be slower. We have developed a unique and speedy way for any supplier to download their orders, process and do status changes on these orders offline, and then to go back online to send their order responses to the buyers. We believe that we have overcome one of the biggest hurdles for suppliers to trade through e-marketplaces," she says.
SAM plugs directly into Commerce One's Supply Order software that MarketSite Africa suppliers use to trade with buyers like Sasol. The solution was developed with partner 3fifteen.
Thomson says one aim of the solution was to ensure that all technical barriers to trade were lifted for suppliers. Many of the MarketSite Africa suppliers have seen their trade with buyers like Sasol increase by as much as 50% since their involvement with the e-marketplace. Buyers on MarketSite Africa include blue chip companies like Sasol, FirstRand as well as netmarketmarkers, individual e-marketplaces, like mymarket.com.
Thomson adds that SAM is a scaleable solution and had dramatically reduced the time that a supplier spends online. "Independent tests showed a supplier with18 orders with a total of 1 306 line items took only three minutes to download these from MarketSite Africa, and just 30 seconds to upload the orders to the e-marketplace. Before we developed SAM this would have taken more than 30 minutes," she says.
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