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

Pulp, paper and paper products
Business example:
Cooperative Outsourcing at United Flexibles GmbH
Four packaging specialists PAWAG (Austria), Sopal PKL, Reuther
Verpackungen and HUECK Folien (Germany) joined forces under the name
of United Flexibles GmbH in order to strengthen their market position vis-àvis
large international companies. They also used this cooperation for a joint
outsourcing of ICT services.
United Flexibles GmbH has outsourced a large part of their infrastructure for
data exchange with customers. The main server architecture for business
integration is operated by a third party service provider (Seeburger AG), and
only a client module (the communication system "BIS:SpokeUnit") is directly
located at each of the four constituent companies. The communication
system is connected to the Seeburger computer centre, where the main
integration server is located. Outsourcing has reduced fixed costs for the
four companies, each of whom now pay a monthly service fee.
The cooperation in a group and joint outsourcing services has enabled the
individual companies to save costs, when comparing their monthly fee to
costs which would occur if each of them had to build and maintain the same
functionality for their B2B exchanges on their own.
Sources: Seeburger (Customer references, see www.seeburger.de);
company websites of United Flexibles GmbH constituent companies.
4.2.3 Peer-to-peer instead of marketplaces
Many of the smaller P&P firms, however, will probably not have the required ICT systems
to conduct sophisticated e-business, even by exploiting opportunities of cooperation – at
least not in the short term. Against this background, large companies from the P&P
industry have created special services for their smaller trading partners to provide them
with at least some of the functionality of more advanced systems.
PDF document exchange – the typical "e-business" of the small firm
If measured only by the number of transactions regardless of transaction value, the
majority of B2B exchanges today are most probably still conducted in a traditional
manner. The exchange of delivery notes, a sub-process of B2B trading, may serve as an
example. A (large) company interviewed for this study reports that currently only about 5-
10% of all delivery notes are directly confirmed by messaging to the ERP system of the
trading partner, while about 90-95% are sent in other, more conventional ways.
A typical method currently used by many firms is to send the delivery note by e-mail as
an attached PDF document. This can be regarded as an intermediate stage between
paper-based and more advanced automated processing. Exchanging PDF documents by
e-mail, as two interviewees said, is "currently the typical 'e-business' of the small
company". On the other hand, interviewees also noted that use of ERP-to-ERP data
exchange is increasing fast and is already the dominant form of B2B in business
transactions between large companies.
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