B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

E-Marketplaces and Collaborative Networks 457
By linking the information systems of their trading partners, companies
can immediately view changes in a wide variety of factors, including
consumer demand and raw material supply. As a result, companies can
respond to changing market conditions with rapid, intelligent decisions,
reducing inventories significantly and maximizing manufacturing throughput.
Companies will no longer compete enterprise-to-enterprise, but supply
chain-to-supply chain
15.3. How E-Marketplaces Fit into a Company's
B2Bi Plans
Until e-marketplaces are integrated into companies' internal processes,
real cost benefits of participating in them cannot be realized. Integrating
an e-marketplace involves complex interactions among back-office
processes and systems, such as existing procurement, enterprise resource
planning and supply chain applications. Some of the major integration
issues that companies face are:
15.3.1. Catalog publishing
Each supplier has to publish the product contents for its buyers and
exchanges. Each buyer and exchange may request its own format to
accept the data. Suppliers run into grave problems when attempting to
manage and maintain the product content for multiple channels.
Solutions from companies like ec-Content solve this problem by
accepting just a single feed of data from suppliers and generating output
in multiple formats acceptable by major exchange vendors, such as Ariba,
Commerce One, Oracle and i2. They also add value to the product information
and pricing, making it easy for them to find, evaluate and buy.
ec-Content's process works as follows (see Figure 15.10):
Step 1 — Supplier provides the data feed to ec-Content.
Step 2 — The Q-Centric process formats and enhances the supplier
catalog products.
Step 3 — ec-Content distributes the files to the supplier's customers
and exchanges in whatever file format they require, for example text
files, EDI, XML, MS Excel.