SCS deliverers true B2B e-business

Asked where the e-marketplace ranks in priority, ex-CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch replied, "it ranks number one, two, three and four".

Safmarine Computer Services (SCS) believes that e-business is about more than just building fancy Web sites - it's about enabling a company to communicate, conduct business and collaborate with its customers and trading partners. SCS has successfully implemented and continues to provide e-business and e-learning solutions to its clients, overcoming many of the challenges in an apprehensive, and often over-traded e-marketplace environment. Some SCS projects include:

When Safmarine embarked on an e-business strategy to revamp its Web site, which at the time offered little in terms of real B2B functionality, it called SCS in to match industry trends which have moved towards Web-enabled container and online booking, cargo tracking and tracing, voyage enquiry and online Bill of Lading viewing and verification and printing.

"It became pretty obvious that it was no longer sufficient to only use the Internet for accessing static information; e-business is all about improving relationships with customers by making it convenient for them to get to critical information and process services all day, every day," says Paul Vaughan, managing director of SCS.

The result is www.safmarine.com, a new sales channel enabling shippers and freight forwarders to plan the delivery of their export containers to the port of shipment through the Web site. The next phase will bring portal technology to the fore, as the site will offer clients a personalised view, enabling them to customise their own site. Enabled through IBM Websphere portal technology, clients will be able to select specific areas of interest, tailoring the site according to their own requirements. This is already in use in over 50 countries and growing rapidly though not without some serious challenges in South Africa where SCS had to contend with high cost and limited bandwidth availability, problems not encountered in Europe.

The main challenge, which SCS faced when building business intelligence applications using Business Objects for Safmarine, Maersk Sealand and Safmarine subsidiary Portlink was the geographical spread, and diversity of the source data required for data warehousing. Although the Safmarine data warehouse was located in Cape Town, data originated from various system environments from all over the globe.

As a result, SCS created data collection and integration facilities built on the Unix Oracle server environment in Cape Town, to collect, transfer and load data marts. Users all over the world can now access these data marts either through Business Object clients or through the Internet using the Business Objects WEBI interface.

SCS went straight to the source when it sent a delegation of seven people for a two-day workshop to the IBM Websphere Innovation Centre based in Hursley, UK, to gain first-hand experience from the developers of Websphere.

"Although SCS has been using this technology for almost a year, the reality is that there is very little Webshpere expertise to draw from in SA. We knew it was time to move our knowledge to a new level and by going over to the UK we gained a better understanding of certain aspects and hands-on experience, which we can now pass onto our clients. We certainly feel more confident after seeing IBM's commitment and we've built up good channels of communication," says Graham Dickinson, SCS Business Solutions Divisional Director. SCS are currently one of the few South African companies with real international Websphere Portal Server technology experience, servicing Safmarine, based in Antwerp.

It wasn't only SCS that gained when it was chosen as the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) representative to participate in the Live Virtual Classroom (LVC) Beta for the new release of IBM Mindspan Solution's market-leading LMS, LearningSpace, but the South African Revenue Service (SARS) as well. SARS will participate in the beta testing for the LVC as the test site, and will be one of the first organisations in the world to have access to this technology. As the only IBM Mindspan accredited e-learning vendor in Africa, SCS is part of a select few organisations worldwide that are at the forefront of e-learning technology. A first for SA and for the continent.

SCS's approach to e-business is to ask: What happens when you combine the core process of a business and its overall business objectives with the broad reach of Internet technology? The possibilities are endless.