MarketSite Africa successfully upgrades software

MarketSite Africa recently successfully completed an upgrade to the latest version of its e-marketplace software. This upgrade provides its 700 suppliers and more than 5 000 buyers more choices than ever before as they trade with each other across the e-marketplace.

Despite many of the negative sentiments around Internet-based e-marketplaces, MarketSite Africa has continued to grow bringing on new clients and extending its supplier base substantially. The e-marketplace provides its customers with the ability to streamline inefficient business processes by integrating multiple supplier channels, reducing off contract spend and allowing access for buyers to multiple suppliers through a single connection.

During 2002 MarketSite Africa's volumes grew by 320% and the number of suppliers grew to 700 suppliers who now trade with 40 buying organisations across the revamped trading infrastructure.

Says Janice Kallmeyer, COO of Online Liquidity, the holding company of MarketSite Africa: "We have been through our first full month of trade following the upgrade of our MarketSite platform."

Kallmeyer adds that the upgrade is part of MarketSite Africa's vision to provide its customers with the most advanced and robust technology available.

"This upgrade has provided a scaleable platform with improved functionality giving trading organisations increased flexibility and control over their e-commerce dealings through MarketSite Africa," she says. These include enhanced administrative functions, improved order management tools, new features like blanket purchase order support, and invoicing. Buyers now have access to a new user administration section which provides them with more control over their access to services on MarketSite Africa.

The MarketSite 4.6 upgrade, a Commerce One product, incorporates two types of changes: user interface related changes and feature or functionality changes. Kallmeyer added that the MarketSite Africa team also ensured that all customisations, such as an offline tool, were considered during the upgrade. The offline tool allows suppliers with slow Internet connection speeds to process their orders without having to be connected to the Internet.

Kallmeyer said: "To ensure a smooth change over, the team ran some test upgrades in a pilot environment, and then started moving clients across to the new environment ahead of schedule. We wanted to fully test and monitor performance with high volumes before the December break with the intention of returning to a completely operational environment in the new year."

Problems were minimal and those that arose were predominantly around user training, and supply order printing functionality. Says Kallmeyer: "These were resolved within a couple of weeks and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Suppliers are reporting that they are more in control of their environment with its enhanced functionality like catalogue loading tools and the ability to upload orders in batches from their offline environments."