In a joint venture with Nasdaq-listed US software vendor Peregrine Systems Inc, MGX has made the document exchange facilitator Get2Connect available to the South African market. The solution will be implemented by MGX Hosted Services, and targeted at e-market creators.
Get2Connect supports e-business between buyers and sellers. It provides a common infrastructure shared by multiple marketplaces and trading communities and is delivered on an ASP (application service provision) basis. The offering includes a data centre and call centre at MGX Hosted Services to facilitate liaison with trading partners.
Peregrine currently runs a Get2Connect hub based in Atlanta serving the North American market, and one in Karlsruhe in Germany which serves Europe. The third hub - situated in Midrand - will serve the African continent. The two existing hubs support over 44 000 trading partners executing over 1,2 million transactions per day.
"There is much excitement and hype regarding e-marketplaces and e-exchanges at the moment," says Andrew Procter, GM at MGX Get2Connect. "But, while most of them enable buyers and sellers to set up deals via the Internet, they do not support document exchange and conversion to partners` systems.
Get2Connect enables companies to build and manage business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce communities by enabling end-to-end connectivity and integration.
Another major challenge is the provision of e-catalogues. If you are comparing prices or offerings from multiple vendors in an e-marketplace, the vendors need to use standard definitions of their products to enable you to make comparisons. Every vendor is required to produce an e-catalogue in a standard format for a particular trading community. The problem, however, is that not every community uses the same set of standards. Get2Connect enables the creation of catalogues to a universal standards link."
Get2Connect maximises a company`s e-commerce investment by facilitating the creation of electronically enabled trading partners, in the process boosting return on investment. Because no rekeying of data is required, order processing errors are eliminated and replaced by document flow from the buyer`s back office system into that of the supplier.
It facilitates delivery of orders directly into the supplier`s business system and thereafter manages the flow of documents such as orders, order acknowledgements, dispatch notices, goods received notices, invoices and payment receipts. This flow is crucial to the success of an integrated electronic trading community, as all documents have to be standardised and mapped to standards supported by members of the trading community so they can be translated and downloaded to each trader`s back-office system. With fewer staff required to process orders, labour costs are reduced. Procter notes that US research indicates an 80% drop in procurement costs for Get2Connect users. Accurate catalogues and inventory data lead to smarter purchasing decisions and lower carrying costs. Data encryption and TCP/IP messaging ensure secure transactions over the Internet.
Business community integration (BCI) methodology connects business partners regardless of size, platform or standard, says Procter. "It caters for a wide variety of levels of trading partner sophistication - from small mom-and-pop shops to large tech-savvy corporate organisations. This is particularly important in South Africa because of the number of SMEs."
BCI requires a trading community to decide what documents it needs to exchange, and in what format. MGX deals with each member of the trading community individually and provides members with a flexible set of tools that enables them to extract documents from existing systems by mapping them to an agreed format which can then be delivered to trading partners. If an organisation wants to become part of a second trading community, it`s simply a matter of remapping the documents. Procter points out that BCI provides a single point of contact for companies, underpinning the software, connectivity and network solutions.
MGX will be rolling out Get2Connect from the first quarter, starting with e-market creator Miraculum to establish a proof-of-concept marketplace offering direct and non-direct goods procurement.
"Gartner Group indicates there is an ongoing increase in market creators and marketplaces, particularly in vertical markets," says Procter. "Marketplace creation will result in `land grabbing,` but in three to five years, these marketplaces will not be sustainable and consolidation will be the key issue. The focus is already shifting from B2B to application-to-application connectivity. Get2Connect will ensure trading partners have the ability to tap the benefits of an integrated and expertly managed business community."
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