The European e-Business Report 2004 - Berlecon Research GmbH

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The European E-Business Report 20042.3.3 Case studiesThis chapter features abstracts and key lessons learned from case studies which are presented inmore detail in the 2 nd Sector Impact Study from August 2004.VOLTIMUM (EUROPE)BackgroundActivitiesResultsIn 2000, several major players in the electrical industry (ABB, Legrand, Nexans,Osram, Philips, Pirelli and Schneider-Electric) decided to create a European portalfor the electrical installation industry and to set up the technological andorganisational infrastructure of Voltimum.Voltimum aims at being the leading B2B portal website covering the specific needsand requirements of electrical installation professionals. Voltimum is not a tradingportal. It offers a shared platform for manufacturers and other industry partners formarketing and communication, as well as a single entry point for marketinginformation (a rich product database for the electrical installation industry).Voltimum provides the following services:• a portal website and online service tool for all users• “the richest” database for the electrical installation industry• an on-line marketing tool for manufacturers• an option to distributors for information-deep-linking (VoltiLink function)The main target groups are electricians (installation professionals) and prescriptionproviders (distributors) to whom information regarding increasingly complexproducts is provided.To date, more than 20m Euro have been invested in Voltimum. This includessoftware and hardware platforms, as well as 3 years working capital to launch theproject. It took 24 months to create the database. The final application was tailormade,based on open source (Linux/PHP).Voltimum has established itself as the reference portal website of the industry in2003 with 250,000 products in its online catalogue, 110 catalogues and 220,000associated documents, 35 manufacturing partners and 80 brands. 500 wholesaleroutlets distributor branches are listed in the Voltimum directories. In 2004, the portalachieves between 1-4 million page views per month and has about 120,000registered users.• E-support to electricians looking for solutions to functional problems. Thisfunction resembles e-training and can develop into e-learning. In fact, the nextstage (2005) will focus on adding product knowledge and general technicalknowledge to the web-site.• The evolution of the site toward offering more transactional functionalities israther slow. The next step should be the online delivery process, but most of thecountries (except Sweden) are not yet ready. The rate of RFQs (Requests forQuotation) is still low, with about 300 RFQs out of 1,000,000 requests. Thesetypes of functionalities (product prices, availability of products) are already oftensupplied by distributors, but are not often used by installers.• SMEs (providing “minor brands”) have shown strong interest and were highlymotivated to be referenced in Voltimum, because they see it as an opportunityto be driven by “major brands”. Their products gain more visibly whereas theirmarketing investment in product information decreases.105
The European E-Business Report 2004LAKE COMMUNICATIONS (IRELAND)BackgroundActivitiesResultsLake Communications, a medium sized enterprise (120 employees) headquarteredin Dublin, is a supplier of wireless and wired communications products targeted atthe residential and small office segments. Products are sold indirectly to the endcustomer (consumer market) via its partnerships with major telecom operators (suchas BT) and Internet service providers (ISPs).LAKE radically streamlined the delivery process for its products in order tocounteract the following difficulties:• Escalating costs due to holding and storage of stock (contractual obligation tohold agreed levels of goods at their distributors warehouse facility).• A low degree of control over manufacturing and distribution (shipping of ordersprocess), as no automation existed.• Costly, repetitive administrative procedures, since all orders needed to bemanually entered into their ERP system.The overall supply chain system required tight integration with three partners. Theoperational workflow process was precisely designed with the customer, from thefirst stage (customer would place orders through their existing EDI system) until thelast stage (deliver the parcel to the end customer). Once the system was up andrunning, the process of getting shipments to end customers would be completelyautomated.Instead of holding large volumes of stock at their distributors, LAKE could now workaccording to the “just in time” principle of manufacturing on demand. The processwould be as follows: A telecommunications company places an order, with ordersbeing batched and forwarded to LAKE’s system three times per day. The orderwould be sent to manufacturing to fulfil it and ship the requested item to thedistributor. The distributor would then ship it directly to the customer.In all, the project took approximately two man-years to design, build, integrate andimplement. The total budget amounted to 379,000 Euro (of which public foundingwas 127,000 Euro). Prior to the rollout, the customer received training from LAKE inhow to operate the web interface in order to query, monitor and amend orders. Theordering process experienced by the customer (firstly 15 BT branches) remainedthe same as before, with all orders coming via their EDI system.• The automation of the supply chain system provided much more control of thewhole process from ordering to delivering to their end users. Integration withboth their manufacturer and distributor’s systems has also improvedrelationships.• Lake is now in a better position to guarantee delivery times to their customersand to make more accurate forecasts of demand levels.• One of the main challenges experienced by Lake Communications was relatedto the points of integration with partners' systems. These had to cover all fileformats transmitted between the two parties, the protocols used and the timingof these transmissions. The main problem that arose was the reliance on thirdparties to fulfil their integration tasks in a set time frame. As there was no formalcontractual agreement between each party with regard to the e-businessproject, the project time lines and milestones often slipped.106
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