Leading global chemical and pharmaceutical groups and suppliers of technical equipment have announced their commitment to jointly establish an open electronic marketplace for material repair and overall (MRO) supplies. This open e-commerce community will be based upon the collaborative mySAP.com e-business solutions environment and marketplace technology.
The community presently comprises BASF AG, Bayer AG, Degussa-H"uls AG, Henkel KgaA and Wacker-Chemie GmbH on the buying side, as well as suppliers KSB AG, Linde AG, Sartorius AG, Siemens AG and Heinz Wollschl"ager GmbH & Co. KG on the selling side.
Says Freek Malherbe, product manager at leading provider of inter-enterprise software solutions SAP South Africa: "The Chemical and Pharmaceutical Marketplace project, which was launched in December last year, will establish a platform for electronic commerce, collaboration and industry-information exchange. The mySAP.com marketplace for chemical and pharmaceuticals companies will go live at the beginning of the second quarter of 2000.
"Although the pilot companies for the project have already been selected, South African companies will still have the opportunity to be part of the advisory group, which will review the development and give input on requirements not covered in the pilot development.
"For the companies involved on the buying side, the mySAP.com chemical and pharmaceuticals marketplace will enable industry-wide standardisation of procurement. This will result in increased market transparency and aggregated buying power, reduced costs for product evaluation, increased efficiency and faster innovation," Malherbe explains.
"Sellers joining the mySAP.com marketplace will be able to globally standardise and simplify their sales channels as well as get access to a broad base of potential customers. For both sides, the industry-wide standardisation of procurement will result in reduced costs for business processes as well as simplified handling of agreements and tendering."
Renowned for its leading Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, SAP is delivering on the vision of virtual integration with mySAP.com. mySAP.com provides an open collaborative business environment of personalised solutions on demand. These Internet offerings provide companies with seamless end-to-end integration of SAP and non-SAP solutions, originating at the point of customer contact with customer relationship management applications and extending throughout the business operation to provide a total e-business environment.
Since May last year, when SAP unveiled its Internet business strategy, the company has laid the groundwork for mySAP.com by delivering across-the-board usability improvements and full Web-accessibility. mySAP.com software solutions are built on the open SAP Internet-Business Framework, which provides a Web-standards-based, flexible and open infrastructure for all mySAP.com solutions.
SAP has the stated objective of developing nineteen vertical industry marketplaces and three cross industry communities spanning from Aerospace and Defence to Consumer Products within the foreseeable future. The company is in a position to offer a unique marketplace based on its 12,000 customers and 10 million users who can now collaboratively buy and sell to each other.
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