ICT and e-Business in the Pulp, Paper and Paper ... - empirica

Pulp, paper and paper products
4.1.7 Summary and conclusions
The importance of standards and interoperability for e-business is commonly
acknowledged. 76 In the forest and paper products supply chain, the papiNet® standard
has been successfully established as the main industry standard for e-business.
Even if papiNet® is by all measures a well managed and successful initiative, there is still
a lot of scope for new implementations of this standard, especially for those involving
SMEs. Due to legacy factors and wide diversity of partners from different industries,
implementation issues are not always straightforward. Currently, as the e-Business
Survey 2006 shows, only about 2-3% of firms in the P&P industry say that they use this
standard, and these are mainly large enterprises (see Exhibit 3-8). However, their
number as well as the amount of messages exchanged increase fast (see Section 4.1.4).
The strengths of the papiNet® organisation and its processes may have strong potential
for similar cooperative developments in other sectors. In this sense, papiNet® could
serve as role model. This study has identified some factors which have substantially
contributed to the success of papiNet, and which could also be success factors for the
deployment of industry standards in other sectors:
papiNet® Success Factors
decentralised development and deployment: the implementation focus can
differ between market segments and market areas, depending on the specific
semantic issues that are most important in the segment/area;
a clear messaging interoperability strategy, supported by a strong basis in stable
message standards (ebXML);
effective cross-sectoral partnerships, and
no certification overheads.
To further enhance this deployment, there is an ongoing requirement for good case
studies on the practical benefits accruing to SMEs that implement papiNet®. The case
study on Stora Enso illustrated this point: the initial excitement of smaller partners for
papiNet® implementation is often dampened when the magnitude of the task relative to
their existing software architecture is understood.
In this sense, although papiNet® is universally recognised as being a very good standard,
specific implementations (e.g. in particular market sub-sectors) do not always require all
the data elements in the standard messages. In particular, having to process a full
general papiNet® message would be perceived as an “overkill” by those whose business
management software consists of simple spreadsheet calculation. Thus, the further
deployment and broad adoption of such standards for e-business partly depend on the
installed base of business software systems, such as ERP systems. This aspect is
discussed in more detail in the following section.
76
See e-Business W@tch Special Report on Interoperability and Standards, September 2005.
Available at www.ebusiness-watch.org ('resources')
105